Protect your Personal Computer (PC)

Antivirus Software - An Overview
We strongly recommend that you help protect your computer from viruses by installing and using an antivirus program. The Internet is full of fun places and vast amounts of information, but also some dangers. Your computer can be damaged by a computer virus sent through e-mail or through a program downloaded from the Web. If you do not use antivirus software, you run the risk of passing viruses along to other computers as well. If you administer a network without virus protection software, all of the computers on your network might be vulnerable.


Virus

A virus is a program that can copy itself and infect various parts of your computer, such as documents, programs, and parts of your operating system. Most viruses attach themselves to a file or part of your hard disk and then copy themselves to other places within the operating system. Some viruses contain code that inflicts extra damage by deleting files or lowering your security settings, inviting further attacks.


Worm

different from viruses in that they copy themselves from system toA worm is a program that makes copies of itself and can spread outside your operating system; it can copy itself from one computer to another by using e-mail or another transport mechanism. Worms can damage computer data and security in much the same ways as viruses, but are system.


Trojan Horse

A Trojan horse is a harmless-looking program designed to trick you into thinking it is something you want, but which performs harmful acts when it runs. It is typically received through downloads from the Internet. Trojan horses do not spread by themselves like viruses and worms. Most virus protection programs only detect a limited number of Trojan horses. A good way to help protect your computer from Trojan horses is to visit only Web sites you trust, and avoid downloading things unless you trust the source as well.


How do antivirus programs help protect your computer?
horses. If a virus, worm, or Trojan horse is found, the antivirus program either quarantines it or deletes it entirely before it damages yourAntivirus programs scan e-mail and other files on your computer for viruses, worms, and Trojan computer and files.

antivirus programs have an automatic update capability. When your antivirus software is updaSome companies that make antivirus programs provide regular updates for viruses. Manyted, new viruses are added to a list of viruses to check for, protecting your computer from new attacks. If your antivirus updates are not automatic, we recommend that you check for updates on viruses are identified every day. If a frequent basis because new the antivirus program you are using requires a subscription, we strongly recommended that you keep the subscription current to receive regular updates. If your list of viruses is out of date, your computer is vulnerable to new threats.

Where can I get an antivirus program?
There are many antivirus programs on the market.

Some of the companies which sell Antivirus softwares are listed above.

Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8, Safari 4 - the War begins

Mozilla's Firefox 3 is ready to challenge Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which won't be updated until later this year. Firefox has 18 percent of the global browser market and has been made faster, more secure and customizable. Mozilla's Firefox 3 also comes with malware and forgery protection.

Just more than 10 years ago, Mozilla threw its open-source code into the public domain. Today, its browser -- Firefox -- is preparing to launch its third major release in hopes of continuing to eat away at Microsoft Relevant Products/Services's Internet Explorer.

Firefox already has more than 18 percent of the global market, according to Net Applications. With the release of Firefox 3, Mozilla could see a boost in downloads and market share. Microsoft's next version of Internet Explorer won't come to market until later this year.

On June 17, Mozilla will release Firefox 3. After more than 34 months of active development and the contributions of thousands of people, Firefox 3 will be downloadable free from the Mozilla Web site. Mozilla is promising this is the best browser -- period.

"Firefox 3 is a very nice browser. It's still going to have to go up against Internet Explorer [Windows] and Safari [Mac], which have the home court advantage on their operating systems," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch. "It shows that the browser market is anything but stagnant."


A Focus on Security Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 15,000 updates, including some major re-architecting for improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. The result, Mozilla said, is a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer Web-site and Firefox add-on developers.

Mozilla begins with a focus on security. Users can click a Web site's favicon [icon] in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if the connection is secure. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand, Mozilla said. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site's favicon will turn green and show the name of the company.

Firefox 3 also has malware protection to warn users when they arrive at sites known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or the like. And a new Web Forgery Protection service blocks the content of pages suspected as Web forgeries. New SSL error pages, Mozilla said, are clearer and stricter, and Firefox automatically disables old and insecure add-on and plug-in versions.

Add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will also be disabled. Firefox will inform antivirus software when downloading executables and the browser respects the Vista parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Easier, More Personal
Mozilla also concentrated on making Firefox easier to use and more personalized. In terms of password management, that means an information bar replaces the old password dialog so users can save passwords after a successful login. The add-on whitelist has been removed, making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks. And a new download manager aims to makes it much easier to locate downloaded files. Users can also see and search the Web site where a file came from.

Firefox 3 allows users to add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click and associate keywords with bookmarks to sort them. Web applications, such as a favorite Webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications to handle Web-site mail links. The Add-ons Manager can be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of add-ons available from Mozilla's Web site.

Gartenberg expects the competition to dominate browsing will continue. Even now, Microsoft is working on the release of IE 8 and Apple is seeding Safari 4. "Clearly, Web browsers are still very important, as important as they were 10 years ago, but just in a different way," he said. "The bottom line is no one is actually paying for a browser any more. A browser is free. It's something you give away in order to make money elsewhere."

Universal Serial Bus (USB)

USB

Anyone who has been around computers for more that two or three years knows the problem that the Universal Serial Bus is trying to solve -- in the past, connecting devices to computers has been a real headache!

• Printers connected to parallel printer ports, and most computers only came with one. Things like Zip drives, which need a high-speed connection into the computer, would use the parallel port as well, often with limited success and not much speed.
• Modems used the serial port, but so did some printers and a variety of odd things like Palm Pilots and digital cameras. Most computers have at most two serial ports, and they are very slow in most cases.
• Devices that needed faster connections came with their own cards, which had to fit in a card slot inside the computer's case. Unfortunately, the number of card slots is limited and you needed a Ph.D. to install the software for some of the cards.

The goal of USB is to end all of these headaches. The Universal Serial Bus gives you a single, standardized, easy-to-use way to connect up to 127 devices to a computer. Each device can consume up to a maximum of 6 megabits per second (Mbps) of bandwidth, which is fast enough for the vast majority of peripheral devices that most people want to connect to their machines.

USB Ports

Just about any computer that you buy today comes with one or more Universal Serial Bus connectors on the back. These USB connectors let you attach everything from mice to printers to your computer quickly and easily. The operating system supports USB as well, so the installation of the device drivers is quick and easy, too. Compared to other ways of connecting devices to your computer (including parallel ports, serial ports and special cards that you install inside the computer's case), USB devices are incredibly simple!

Now, we will look at USB ports from both a user and a technical standpoint. You will learn why the USB system is so flexible and how it is able to support so many devices so easily -- it's truly an amazing system!

USB Devices

Just about every peripheral made now comes in a USB version. A sample list of USB devices that you can buy today includes:

• Printers
• Scanners
• Mouse
• Joysticks
• Flight yokes
• Digital cameras
• Webcams
• Scientific data acquisition devices
• Modems
• Speakers
• Telephones
• Video phones
• Storage devices such as Zip drives
• Network connections

Computer Hard Disk Drive

Hard Disk
Hard disks were invented in the 1950s. They started as large disks up to 20 inches in diameter holding just a few megabytes. They were originally called "fixed disks" or "Winchesters" (a code name used for a popular IBM product). They later became known as "hard disks" to distinguish them from "floppy disks." Hard disks have a hard platter that holds the magnetic medium, as opposed to the flexible plastic film found in tapes and floppies.

At the simplest level, a hard disk is not that different from a cassette tape. Both hard disks and cassette tapes use the same magnetic recording techniques described in how tape recorders work. Hard disks and cassette tapes also share the major benefits of magnetic storage -- the magnetic medium can be easily erased and rewritten, and it will "remember" the magnetic flux patterns stored onto the medium for many years.


How it works

Nearly every desktop computer and server in use today contains one or more hard-disk drives. Every mainframe and supercomputers is normally connected to hundreds of them. You can even find VCR-type devices and camcorders that use hard disks instead of tape. These billions of hard disks do one thing well -- they store changing digital information in a relatively permanent form. They give computers the ability to remember things when the power goes out.

In this article, we'll take apart a hard disk so that you can see what's inside, and also discuss how they organize the gigabytes of information they hold in files!

Open Source Software Codes

If you are an end user and wants to know about a computer program & its codes, it may not be easy, specially in the making of a monopoly over software by giant software firm.

and if you are a beginner in programming & wants to see & experiment some codes, may not be an easy one as the programmers usually were busy & getting reliable codes are also a dream for many.

last but not least, if you are a programmer looking for a platform to publish your project work, discuss issues with similar minded persons & publish codes, there is a centralized resource site which will satisfy all the needs of the above said category, its SourceForge.net.

It is said to be the world's largest Open Source software development web site. SourceForge.net provides free hosting to Open Source software development projects with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code.

So, finding the open source programs & codes are now easy.

Web Security Trends

Cyber-criminals are developing a new genre of highly sophisticated and evasive attacks designed to bypass signature-based and database-reliant security technology.

The latest Web Security Trends Report (Q2 2007) from security firm Finjan warns of a proliferation of "affiliation networks" based on a "hosted model" for malicious code.

The networks use off-the-shelf malicious code packages to compromise highly popular websites and even government domains.

Finjan's study points to the growing presence of malicious code in online advertising on legitimate websites.

"Recent findings reveal that hackers have created a new class of highly evasive attacks which represent a quantum leap in terms of technological sophistication, going far beyond drive-by downloads and code obfuscation," the report states.

"In order to minimise the malicious code's window of exposure, evasive attacks keep track of the actual IP addresses of visitors to a particular website or web page."

Using this information, the attackers restrict exposure to the malicious code to a single view from each unique IP address.

This means that the second time a given IP address tries to access the malicious page, a benign page will be automatically displayed in its place. All traces of the initial malicious page completely disappear.

"Evasive attack techniques, where malicious code is controlled per IP address, country of origin or number of visits, provide hackers with the ability to minimise the malicious code's exposure, thereby reducing the likelihood of detection," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan.

"Moreover, evasive attacks can identify the IP addresses of crawlers used by URL filtering, reputation services and search engines, replying to these engines with legitimate content and increasing the chances of mistakenly being classified as a legitimate category.

"The combination of these evasive attacks with code obfuscation techniques significantly enhances the capability of sophisticated hackers to go undetected. "

A follow-up study conducted by Finjan's Malicious Code Research Centre warns of the growing presence of malicious code in online advertising.

As websites depend more on ad revenues, they often display ads from third-party advertising networks over which they may have little or no control.

While legitimate website owners trust advertisers to display non-malicious content, advertisers sometimes "sublet" space to others.

This hierarchy can often comprise several layers, seriously compromising the level of control the website owner has over advertising content.

The report includes an analysis of an innocent blog site that deploys keyword-based advertisements placed automatically from an ad server.

Finjan found that the ad content also included obfuscated references to malicious code on a third site that uses multiple infection techniques to download a Trojan key-logger to the user's machine.

Another recent example was a banner ad hiding code with the ANI exploit that was being hosted unknowingly on one of the most popular techie websites.

Trojan hits Google's text ads

A new Trojan that hijacks Google text ads and replaces them with ads from a different provider has been picked up by BitDefender.

The antivirus company has identified the threat as Trojan.Qhost.WU which modifies the infected computer's host file, a local storage for domain name/IP address mappings.

The infected machine's browser then reads advertisements from a server at the replacement address rather than from Google.

This damages users and webmasters because it takes away viewers and thus a possible money source from their websites.

Users are advised to let antivirus software delete the Trojan.