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12 |^ |^ May 2020
The phantom menace
Adware is a growing problem, aided by
social engineering. Here’s how to keep it away
he world of malware is
constantly changing
and evolving – who’d
heard of nasties
like ransomware,
cryptomining or social
engineering until relatively recently?
In its State of Malware 2020 report,
Malwarebytes noted some interesting
trends. One was that malware is
increasingly focusing its attentions
on business rather than consumers
– presumably because cyber criminals
spy bigger gains to be made.
That said, don’t ditch all your anti-
virus software just yet – consumer
infections were only down a paltry two
percent on the previous year. Of more
significance is the changing landscape.
The biggest source of infections by far
are adware – these are programs that
don’t carry malware themselves, but try
to trick people into either downloading
malware or giving up personal details.
The biggest jump in the list is by
so-called ‘hack tools’, which are again
often legitimate programs that provide
hackers with a way into networks (see
pages 16-17). The growth in popularity
of both adware and hack tools suggests
that security software’s ability to spot
and detect more traditional forms of
malware means cybercriminals are
shifting their focus towards weaker
spots in your defences.
Not all newer threats stay the course:
cryptomining, whereby malware
allowed criminals to hijack some of your
computer’s processing power to help
them mine for Bitcoin and other digital
currency has fallen away in popularity.
But even here, new variants continue to
emerge alongside existing ones, while
traditional forms of infection from
worms to trojans, spyware to back
doors, remain a persistent threat.Stay safe
With infections on the decrease you may
be tempted that now’s a good time to
let your security software subscription
lapse and revert to free protection.While it’s true Microsoft Security – built
on the back of Windows Defender – is
scoring highly in independent malware
tests (it’s currently listed as a TopRemoving stubborn infections
In most cases your security software should stop infections in
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mode with networking – doing so usually cripples the
malware enough to allow your security software to download
the latest updates, perform a successful scan and remove the
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you’ve not been locked out by the malware, switch to the Boot
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and rebooting.
If this doesn’t work, visit your security vendor’s home page
on a clean machine to create a rescue disc – failing that, use
Kaspersky’s tool (https://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/
rescuedisk), which is free for all. Boot from this, thus bypassing
Windows entirely, and you should have all the tools you need
to search for and defeat any infections.
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to verify all traces of it have gone – both before and after
rebooting back into Windows proper.
Windows Security offers a good
first line against attacks, but it
still needs additional help.Beef up the Windows Firewall’s security with this
free add-in that allows you to filter outgoing traffic.Rescue discs can purge your computer of infections
that resist removal in Windows itself.