-: In this lesson, I'm going to give you a couple of tips
on how to prevent malware from infecting your system.
This includes malware like viruses, worms, Trojans,
ransomware, spyware, rootkits, and spam.
Let's talk about viruses first. Viruses are most
commonly detected using a good antivirus software.
These can be either third-party solutions like Norton
or McAfee, or using the included Windows Defender
from your operating system.
In addition to antivirus software,
you'll also want to make sure that you're
continually doing your service packs
and updates for your operating system.
Most viruses are going to infect you by taking advantage
of some known exploit, and if it's a known exploit,
your operating system vendor, like Microsoft,
is probably going to already have a patch ready for you.
If you don't patch your system,
or update it and use those service packs,
you're basically asking yourself to get infected.
In addition to having a good antivirus software
that's continually being updated,
you also want to have a good host-based firewall
that will help prevent outside people
from connecting to your machine.
Additionally, whenever you're surfing the Internet,
try to use encrypted websites. This will ensure
that there's no man-in-the-middle connection between you
and the destination that you're trying to get data from.
When we talk about worms, Trojans,
and ransomware, much like viruses,
these are best detected using anti-malware solutions.
Now, ransomware is usually going to be detected,
not in its fully ransomware form, but instead,
through its delivery mechanism,
which is most commonly a Trojan horse.
Remember, it's always important to ensure
that your anti-malware solution is current and up-to-date,
both for its definitions and for its scanning engine.
Spyware is software that's installed
on your machine that snoops on you.
It collects data and sends it back to its owners.
Well, if you want to stop spyware,
you need a good anti-spyware product.
There are third-party ones available out there,
but again, Windows Defender has this capability built in.
Just like anti-malware solutions, you need to ensure
that your definitions are up-to-date so it can scan
and detect most types of spyware out there.
Also, when you're browsing the Internet,
you want to make sure that your web browser's
security settings are set to a non-trusted method,
meaning that you have a very low level
of trust for the sites on the Internet.
This will ensure that you don't accept cookies,
that you don't allow pop-ups and other things
that may get you more spyware installed onto your system.
Now, how do you know if you've been infected with spyware?
Well, there's a couple of common giveaways.
The first one is if you see a lot of pop-up ads.
If you're getting a lot of advertisements based
on traffic that you've done in the past,
someone is looking at your information somehow.
That could be through spyware, it could be through cookies,
or it could be through database retention settings
on their side of the server.
Additionally, another dead giveaway that you've gotten
some adware or some spyware installed on your machine is
when you go to your home page of your browser
and it's no longer your home page.
For example, if whenever you open up your web browser
you default to Google.com, and now,
when you open up your web browser,
you're seeing some other page,
that means somebody has adjusted
your web browser settings, and that could be a sign
that you've been infected with some kind of spyware.
Next, let's talk about rootkits.
Rootkits are a type of malware that installs itself
and tries to bypass the operating system functions,
and it acts as a go-between
between the operating system and the kernel.
Now, this makes them very, very difficult to detect.
In fact, if you're inside Windows
and you're already infected with a rootkit,
it has the ability to tell Windows
that you're not infected, when you really are.
Scanners can detect a file containing a rootkit
before it's installed quite easily,
but once it's been installed,
it becomes very difficult to detect.
To scan your system for rootkit,
you need to boot from an external device.
And that way, you can scan the drive
without it having been loaded up.
Removal of a rootkit is much more difficult,
and the best plan is to simply reimage your machine
from a known good baseline.
Because if you think there's a rootkit,
the chances are, it's going to be really hard to root it out.
And so, instead, just reinstalling the machine
from a known good baseline is a much safer
and better way to go. That way, you know you're
in a good place before you move forward.
Next, let's talk about spam, which is that annoying email
that just clutters up your inbox.
You can use all sorts of things like spam filters
and Outlook security settings to minimize spam.
Really, the spam itself isn't really the big issue
for the end user, though. It's just more of annoyance.
But where it really becomes an issue is
if the spammer is starting to use
your mail servers to send their spam.
Therefore, you need to verify
that your email servers aren't configured
as an open mail relay or as an SMTP open relay,
because you don't want to be sending
out spam on behalf of the spammers.
If you want to prevent spam
from getting into your organization,
there are three main tips you need to follow.
First, you need to remove email addresses from your website,
because there are bots out there
that are crawling the Internet,
gathering up email addresses, just to send spam out to them.
Second, you want to make sure
that you're using whitelists and blacklists.
This is going to say who can send you information,
if they're on the whitelist, and who cannot send
you information, if they're on the blacklist.
And third, you want to train and educate your users,
because as we talked about before,
our users are one of our biggest vulnerabilities.
And so, always training them and educating them
on where to submit their emails to,
which type of websites they should be visiting,
and other things, can help prevent spam
from overtaking your organization.
Now, I know we've talked about a lot
of things in this lesson, but I want
to bring it back down to just three main points.
First, always update your anti-malware solution
automatically, ensure it's scanning
your computer at least weekly.
Second, always update and patch your operating system
and your applications regularly.
If there's a patch out there,
that means there's probably an exploit for it, too.
Third, educate and train your users
on safe Internet surfing practices,
because they are the biggest vulnerability
that you have inside your organization.