Is your computer is running slowly and seems to be at the edge. You may have a virus on your computer. So, let us see, what is a virus? What it can do for your computer? How can you do protect your computer from SPYWARE?

The spyware virus is a malicious program which replicates itself through your computer without asking you or takes permission from you. This spyware program can infect your files and make it malfunction. For example, you may open a Microsoft word file and see it failed to open. Assuming that the cause of this failure is spyware, and then you will likely to see other files malfunctioning  as soon as one file is failed due to a virus on your computer.

Spyware viruses are large collection of instructions attached to one of your programs. These instructions can be coming from different sources such as browsers when you open the internet, a link in email, cd disk, flash memory, or other sources. When one of these programs is opened, these instructions are executed along with the original program you opened and load itself in the memory, and then it can write itself to other files in the computer.

In fact, there are two strategies the spyware can infect you system. The first one is called nonresident strategy. In this type of infection, the spyware virus looks for other files  and resources to infect only on the local computer. In the second strategy, which is called, Resident strategy, the virus looks for other hosts to infect if it is connected to a local network.

The most important is how to prevent these spyware viruses from your computer. The common technique is to install an spyware anti-virus software on your computer. This software works by detecting viruses on your computer. It has many techniques to detect that there is an existing spyware virus according to software vendor. It can detect it based on signature in the file it scan. A signature is a certain pattern it looks for and if exists then it decides that a virus exists. Every spyware sofware that uses this technique has a database of this signatures which represents the most common spyware viruses. Some spyware anti-virus sotware also detect by looking for the behaviour of the file being opened which is called heuristic detection .

A second technique to prevent your computer from viruses is to backup your data. If some files is infected on your computer, you will find some copies of your data. You can store it, for example on CD, or DVD.

In this era of technological phenomena it’s vital to protect your personal computer as well as confidential information.  Whether you have state of the art computer protection or simple 15 dollar virus protection software, you need to make sure you’re using something. Just like career criminals in the real world, the internet is crawling with cyber criminals, without some sort of protection you could be a victim of fraud, or even worse, identity theft. There’s a variety of protection and virus removal software available depending on your price range, user control, and also the kind of protection your pc needs.

Gary Warner, Director of Computer Forensics, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UK) said – bogus postcards circulating on the Internet to reach e-mail inboxes globally contain links that lead to the PC virus – Zeus Bot, as reported by Science Daily on July 25, 2009. He also said the phony postcards direct recipients to follow a link to view its contents, however, the moment the click button is pressed; the Zeus Bot virus unleashes itself on the users’ PCs. Thereafter when infection sets in, the malware enables cyber criminals to intercept banking passwords along with account numbers, and e-mail as well as other sensitive account details of users. Security experts cautioned that users getting e-mails which are allegedly sent to them from a bank or websites like eBay should not click on any link provided in them instead they type the URL of the website from where the message arrives into their browser’s address bar and directly access the site.

There are a variety of viruses out there, one type of virus will attempt to use the system as a platform to spread itself to other contacts on the infected computer user’s MSN contact list and saved email addresses. It can do so by sending messages to your friends and families and entice them to click on normal-looking links to malicious websites. Even files that you have downloaded and plan to forward to your peers might also get infected with the viruses. They can cause of a lot of damages to your PC if they are not removed early. Some viruses may act as a key logger, a monitoring device to record all the keystrokes that you type on your keyboard as well as destroying all the data in your hard disks. Some unfortunate users who have had their systems infected have lost there entire hard drive; passwords and credit card numbers stolen for identity theft.

The best way to protect yourself is to invest in some sort of protection software. That way even when friends and family are using your computer, you are always protected.  If you plan on using the internet a lot and download music, movies, and games, it’s not a bad idea to find a pc scan software to run a self check every few days just to be sure.  You can find a variety of spyware removal and antivirus software at www.removalantivirus.com –  Free Scans

Because new viruses are created constantly, virus protection is never guaranteed, but an updated virus protection software is preferred as you will be protected from new viruses discovered by the manufacturer of the virus protection software you use.

Free virus protection software are often very good, but you should keep away from the scams. To understand why you need a paid or free virus protection, it would be better if you know what a virus is, and how it works. The best way to learn that is actually to be infected by one. We are not going to learn you how to get infected, instead how you best avoid that to happen.

You could be infected right now, totally unaware of it. An email with an virus attachment could also land in your mailbox, and when you open this attachment your computer will be infected. Sooner or later, you’ll receive an email like this. If you have either a paid or a free virus protection, this email should be cleaned, quarantined or deleted. If you don’t have any

protection, you might be in serious trouble.

A virus could be created to do numerous of different things to harm your system. It is a piece of code with the ability to duplicate itself over and over again. A computer virus could for instance cause your telephone bill to show charges for calls made to porn sites, or other suspect sites. Although you are absolutely positive that you have never been on those porn

sites, or anything similar, the charges still appear on your phone bill. What we are talking about here is a so-called “Dialer” -virus. These works with dial-up connections.

Other viruses are made to erase your system files, and the result is a total shutdown of your entire computer system. Viruses could practically do anything they want to. Which intentions the different viruses have, is solely determined by their creators.

So, how do we protect ourselves and our computers against these malicious threats? Well, it has become an endless job to keep systems protected and updated to shield them from the latest threats. No virus protection software, free or paid, knows every virus out there, and there are a large variety of products when it comes to numbers of known virus signatures, and its

ability to find and remove the threats.

Many of the largest virus protection manufacturers are known for having a large signature database, but unfortunately it seems that they are not always the best ones to remove the viruses. What I personally value most when it comes to both paid and free virus protection software, is the software’s ability to find viruses and destroy them, but also that it runs on little system resources. This way you could still run a virus check, and continue to use the computer as you did.

Here is also a lot to choose from, but I will recommend you one piece of free virus protection software that you can test for yourself. It is an open source project started to make private users contribute to the development of this software. It runs on little resources, has a good signature database, and best of all, it’s free.