What do we do when computer attacks increase?

As the saying goes, one foot tall and one foot high, while computer technology continues to develop, various kinds of malicious software come along. According to the latest research report, the number of malicious software attacks in the past two years is the sum of the previous 10 years. .

A store on Valencia Street in San Francisco is a "power" of the city against computer virus software, a computer repair shop called Del Jaljaa.

Almost every day, Jaljaa repair shop will have 5-10 people holding a virus-infected computer over, hoping Jaljaa can help them get the computer back to normal operation. In the past few years, the maintenance of virus related to computer software has accounted for one third of Jaljaa's business. "Software viruses have become the basis for our survival," said Jaljaa.

Computers are more frequently infected with viruses

Virus software infections originate from harmful code, which is what we often hear as "malware", including computer viruses and worms. The emergence of more malware makes Jaljaa's maintenance experts busy all day long. According to the latest research report, the number of viruses discovered by AV-Test company soared in 2014, an increase of 72% compared to 2013, reaching 140 million. The number of malware attacks discovered over the past two years is equal to the sum of the previous 10 years.

Other malware monitoring companies (such as security software makers Malwarebytes and Kaspersky) have also found similar trends. Kaspersky researcher said that the number of mobile malware attacks in 2014 was four times that of 2013.

Over the past few years, anti-virus software has blocked malware based on virus software code. However, there is a high degree of deterrence: the hackers can purchase or download the malware code for free, and then slightly modify it. Therefore, this malicious code will not allow the anti-virus software to easily find it, and then it can spread arbitrarily.

"It's like copying someone else's homework. It's as simple as removing a word or adding a line of words in Microsoft Word documents," said Timo Hirvonen, a researcher at security software maker F-Secure. In this way, malware will continue to change and it will be difficult to stop it.

However, the software security industry is looking for ways to solve this problem. One of the latest technologies is to track the way the virus spreads and its intent. For example, for software that attempts to copy user online banking passwords, such technology tools can track the files they use to steal.

However, even so, security researchers said that their rhythm is often one step slower. The escalating cat and mouse games have even extended into the field of cryptography. Hackers use similar technologies developed by security software companies to prevent malware from being discovered.

Since malware is hard to prevent, do we have to give up using them?

According to Jaljaa, owner of the computer maintenance point, people want to make computers safe. In fact, people still need to do something that they can do. For example, users also need to install security anti-virus software and other security tools, but it should be noted that these software must be updated to The latest version.

If you have a virus in your computer and you are not sure about it yourself, then we will have to look for someone like Jaljaa, but of course we have to pay for it.