Know Thy Enemy: Malware

With the proliferation of malware, understanding what it is, how it propagates and the type of damage it can do is essential to determining your response to removal, protection and repair. Get to know the basics of malware and what to do about it.

From the very first virus in the wild – “Elk Cloner” – which infected Apple II systems back in 1982, to “Sasser”, “Blaster” and “MyDoom”, viruses are as much a part of the PC as the operating system. Unfortunately, their role on the PC has evolved from simple jokes to causing millions of dollars in damage due to employee hours consumed and hardware replacement costs. Add to that the more difficult to measure costs of lost productivity and damage to a company’s reputation and the total costs of viruses is put somewhere between $10 and $100 billion/year. No matter how you measure it, viruses cost money and the cost of dealing with them needs to be a part of your IT budget.

Knowing this, the best thing for you and your team to know about viruses – or the more common term now used to describe all malicious software – and malware is what they are and what they do. Armed with this information, it becomes much easier for you to identify, contain and eliminate malware and minimize the damage it can do to your networked systems. Armed with this information you should be better able to budget for controlling and managing malware.

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