How to Detect Viruses,Spyware before Downloading aFile
THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT COM PUTER MALWARE It’s a familiar enough scenario:You’re on a high from having down loaded your favorite music and you want to get more.You’re making a mental list of which artists to look for,and searching the net for the albums you want to own.You’re now giddy with excitement and can’t wait to proceed. You click open a file to play it and then the unthinkable happens: some malware has found its way into your system and then boom! Your entire laptop gets corrupted. Your hard drive goes poof and so do all the files you stored in there. The thing about downloading files—be it software or zip files and the like—is that there is no way of knowing which one carries a virus until you’ve already downloaded it. You’re lucky if you have an antivirus software installed into your laptop or PC and it’s working consistently. If not, you’re in for a nasty surprise because certain kinds of malware can really ruin your system. But we only really find this out once it’s already there and reversing it will be too late. Regret comes creeping in, but what can we do? We learn our lessons the hard way.
THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM: VIRUSTOTAL
There are ways to prevent this from happening. Let’s see. We could either a) never open the files we downloaded; or b) never download any new file or software. Now I see you shaking your head—it will never do, of course. I know, I know. Downloading new stuff is a part of our lives now, so there has to be a better way, right? And that is why there is such a thing as virustotal, which is a website that offers FREE service on checking suspicious files and URLs. What it does is that it detects the files for viruses, worms, Trojans, and all kinds of malware that can be particularly harmful to your system. It’s fairly easy to use: you just need to paste the URL on the field or select the file from your computer and voila! It will do the rest, so that you will not have to worry about your laptop or PC crashing, or your hard drive becoming corrupted and rendering your precious files irretrievable. Another great things about this site is that you can even have an entire domain checked so you can make sure that all the files you will be downloading from there are 100% virus free and you wouldn’t have to keep checking file by file, which can be pretty exhausting, if I may say, especially of you’ll be downloading a huge number of them.
