Why You Should Check Your Computer For Malware Problems

Completely and correctly scanning your computer for malware like viruses, Trojan horses, rootkits, spyware, adware, worms, etc. is often a very important troubleshooting step. A simple virus scan will no longer do.

Let’s be honest, no one wants to own a computer that is infected with malicious programs. Therefore, it is imperative to practice safe computing habits. You can avoid most malware just by staying away from a few common traps.

But before this article tells you why it is extremely important to check your computer for malware, how do you tell if it is indeed infected? Here are the normal symptoms – which would also jolt you into realizing why you must act now!

Your computer is running extremely slow. This might be a symptom of an infection by a malware. If your computer has been infected by a virus, worm or Trojan, they could be running tasks that take up a lot of resources making your computer system run more slowly than usual. If you are not running a resource-heavy application but your computer is very slow, you might have a computer virus.

You encounter annoying pop-ups!  If you encounter alarming pop-up messages while surfing the internet, claiming a virus has been detected on your computer and that you should download software to get rid of it. Be wary of these. These forms of communications are often scams to trick you into downloading software that can jeopardise the safety of your computer. If these messages did not come from your own anti-virus or anti-spyware applications, don’t trust it. There is either spyware on the computer or it has been infected by a bogus antivirus (also called as a “rogue”).

Your computer has gone unstable. That is another sign that something is wrong with your computer. Most malware messes around with important files that halt your computer running properly. That could cause your computer to crash. If your computer crashes when you try to run a specific application or open a particular file that tells you that something has corrupted the data. It could be malware.

Your Antivirus and firewall protection is unexpectedly disabled. This is yet another common characteristic that your computer may be infected. If all of your security components such as your antivirus and firewall have automatically been disabled without your consent, it is most likely a malware has deactivated your antivirus protection. For that reason, you should continuously check that your antivirus is working and running at full protection.

Here are the reasons why you must checks your computer for malware:

Because sometimes, you don’t realize you have them – until your computer completely refuses to start. These days malicious software is becoming an epidemic. It’s rampant, destructive, and oh-so-discreet. There have been changes in the way malware wreak havoc.  Before, it would simply slow down your computer, or display annoying popups, but nowadays, malware has become so sneaky. You could be infected right now and not even know it. Also, it often seems as if the only way to make sure you’re not infected is to scan your computer with numerous anti-malware programs. Doing this can be time consuming and, while scanning, may even slow your computer to a crawl… and even after that you still can’t be sure you’re clean. This is because scanners cannot recognise all new malware.

 Because these malware are not easy to get rid of – Even after malware has been removed from a computer many of the problems caused by it may still remain. That said, one of the first things you should do in order to fix any of these problems is to make sure that all infections have actually been removed. If you know that you still have infections on your computer then, instead of trying to fix problems while the malware is still present, you should first remove all infections.

 So that you can back-up important files -  Once you have confirmed that your computer is entirely free of malware you should then back up all of your important files. This way if anything goes wrong while fixing the computer, which is a very real possibility, your important documents will still be intact.

 Because crooks are ALWAYS out to target you – Cybercriminals are constantly trying to find holes or vulnerabilities to exploit, and new threats are emerging every day on the web. To stay protected, it is important to have the latest version of the software you are using.

 So that you can update all your anti-malware programs -  Unfortunately, every so often malware get beyond our defenses even though we are careful. Maybe our anti-virus software is out of date or has been compromised by a particularly clever bit of code. Perhaps we clicked on a link by accident and activated a virus. Or someone else used our computer and downloaded some malware by mistake.