Years have passed since the age of innocence in the computing world. Nowadays, there exists an increasing variety of malicious software programs as well as e-mail messages carrying them. Most of these programs can either be classified as viruses, worms, spyware and trojans. Amazingly, one of the victims of such programs was Ed Gibson, Head of Security for Microsoft UK, whose PC was infected by a dialer and started transmitting such programs to other unsuspecting victims.Worms, Viruses: Malicious executable code that can copy itself from one PC to another. Most of them don't perform any other operations apart from simply copying themselves. They can, however, multiply like that very quickly and clog a system. The famous Internet Worm actually brought the whole Internet on it's knees, back in 1988.

It is worth mentioning that in recent years, a significant increase in the number of adware and spyware programs has been noticed, with a subsequent reduction in the number of new viruses being created. This can be explained as follows: While viruses can be a serious threat and can greatly and irreversibly harm your system, adware and spyware programs can actually gather very important personal information such as your credit card number and deliver that information to whoever was responsible for the attack, which most of the times is the creator of the program. An effective system security tool should not just locate these malicious files on your PC but should also be able to permanently erase them.

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