Sometimes, the little things make a big difference. This is true in the computer world; a lot of malware (software that is designed with malicious intent) will try to get into your computer through applications that are installed on your computer. If you take a moment to think like a malware maker, your goal is to install your malware on as many computers as possible, so you will want to make you work count. What are some programs that everyone uses, here are a few, that are free and in use quite often:
1. Adobe Acrobat Reader – If I sent you an email that had an attachment called filename.pdf, you would need Acrobat Reader or Acrobat to use it. This is a great program that allows you to view documents and make the most of it (searching, printing, organizing, etc.) Tons of people have this program, in fact, the last count I found was 500 million copies since 1993 according to Adobe themselves… A very rich target
2. Adobe Flash Player – Ever watch a movie on You Tube? If so, you use the Adobe Flash Player which is very good at giving you audio/video without a lot of delay waiting for it to load. This program has, according to Adobe, been installed on 99% of internet enabled computers, yet again, target rich for malware vendors…
3. Sun JRE (a.k.a. Java) – Now Java is a lot of things, but when users talk about Java, they are talking about the Java Runtime Environment, which is used for a lot of interactive programs that you may find on websites, for example, moving radar on weather.gov. According to Sun, the maker of Java, it is installed on over 800 million PCs and 2 billion mobile devices!
So back to the original point, if you think about those three programs and think about installing your malware, you would want to focus on taking advantages of flaws in those programs to get your malware installed. The next step is that the malware maker will setup what are called “Drive-By downloads”, which is a download that the user didn’t authorize or was tricked into. Malware vendors will go ahead and take advantage of unpatched servers and put in their drive-by download, then as users go by and view these webpages, the malware is installed into your system without your intervention, and the exploit is executed. Simply put, some generally safe websites that you, as a user, visit on a daily basis are compromised due to website hosts not taking the time to keep their websites safe. This has happened to Yahoo and other major sites in the past, so don’t think you have to go to shady websites, though your odds of infection go up quite a bit there..
So what can you do, as a user, to keep your computer a little safer???
- Download a free update, once a month, for your Adobe Acrobat Reader here
- Download a free update, once a month, for your Adobe Flash Player here
- Download a new version of Java, once a month from here
- Get a good antivirus program, I always prefer one that you pay for as opposed to AVG, which is a fine antivirus, but I always appriciate the little things from a paid version. Checkout McAfee or CA
