How To Become A Pro Hacker, P6: Viruses

Something you just can’t ignore in your hacking journey are viruses.
Not will you only receive viruses, but with some luck you can make your own!
I’ll tell you about how you can protect yourself to viruses, and how to delete a virus if it already is to late.

Previous: P5: Boards

1. Different types of viruses:

• Malware
• Trojans
• Spyware
• Adware
• Worms
• Time Bombs
• Polymorphic Viruses
• Skid-viruses

Of course there are plenty more types of viruses, but these are the most for common.
I’ll explain all those, and you’ll see that some properties overlay each other and type A can also be type B for a part.

Malware (Malicious Software) is the collection of all malignant/harmful programs.

Trojans are programs written by a hacker to mine bitcoins, control/spy your whole PC or mess around with you. When a hacker has a bunch of infected people (Better known as slaves) he has a Botnet, he will also be able to perform a DDoS with it.

Spyware are programs to record all your actions you do on your PC. An example of spyware is a key-logger, A key-logger with record all keys you press on your keyboard and mostly send them to the e-mail address of the hacker. Mostly used to find passwords.

Adware is an a pretty innocent type of virus, it shows up advertises on every site, opens new tabs, infect links with advertises,... It can be extremely annoying, but it is easy to delete. :)

Worms aren’t really computer-viruses because they don’t need a program to attach theirself to. A worm spreads itself from computer to computer and is mostly used to attack a network, but can also be used to attack a computer.

Time bombs are viruses who are programmed to execute themself on a specific date.

Polymorphic viruses are programmed like that, that they can change theirself and their behaviour to evade the detection of Anti-Viruses.

Skid-viruses these aren’t real viruses, and actually doesn’t really exists. It are scripts written by skids (script-kids) who are still beginners in hackers. These scripts are mostly made in easy computer-programming languages like Batch, and perform little pretty innocent attacks to a computer, like deleting some files.
Smart skids can make some pretty advanced one, who are more effective.

Now you know something about viruses and malware. But how can you protect yourself against it?
The best method is of course using Anti-Viruses. These will scan a selected file or your whole PC and delete every malicious file. I’ll list some AVs here and give my personal opinion about it.

2. Anti-Viruses:

• Avast
• Malware bytes
• Bullguard
• CCleaner

Avast is a free and good AV. I use it always if my PC is running slow after a download or random. And it mostly detects viruses as well.

Malware bytes isn’t really an AV... But it works awesome to detect Trojans or backdoors. If you think you are infected with a Trojan use this tool! :D

Bullguard is also an awesome tool, I use it to scan single files or sometimes my whole PC. It works very well for single files.

CCleaner, let’s one thing be clear! This is NOT an anti-virus at all, CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is used to delete... Well, Crap! It is awesome to fix a slow PC as well. :)

To scan your PC 100%, I recommend using first Avast, than Malware bytes, and then CCleaner. Not all at the same time! If you run multiple AV at the same time, they will ‘fight’ against each other and sometimes even detect each other as virus... You have to scan it all one-by-one, only if they all doesn’t detect something, you are allowed to run multiple at once. :)
Of course, also use your regular standard AV, where you are trusted with. :D

There are also a lot of AV sites where you can see the results of a lot of AVs in once for free.
Some examples are: Virustotal.com & Nodistribution.com
It is highly recommended to scan your files there before you share them, so people know if your file is save or not.