What are the biggest dangers in malware?

I would like to know what other people think are the biggest dangers of malware. Especially what it does to users, or how it makes money.|||Theft of financial information (credit card #s, bank account info) would be the greatest threat to the individual home user.





Extortion, often via DDOS attacks, would be a huge threat in the corporate environment.|||Trojans, Backdoors, and Fake Anti-Virus. Personal Anti-Virus has started infecting a ton of people, I recommend the following things to Malware proof your computer:





For Anti-Virus:


AVAST! or AVG. Both Work Well and I've Personally Used Both of them. AVG is simpler to use in my opinion and everything is clearly labeled. If You Want to Pay for your Anti-Virus, I Suggest Norton 2009.





For Firewall:


I'd go for ZoneAlarm which I also use. At first its a little annoying because everything that trys to get onto the internet pops up a window. But after telling it to allow your internet browser and this and that a few times, its a walk in the park





For Anti-Spyware


Malwarebytes Anti-Malware %26amp;


Spybot Search and Destroy


By the way, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware updates like a lot like more than twice a day.





Other:


Download Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool From the Microsoft Website. It Updates on the Second Tuesday of every month. To use it other than the first time, go to the start menu, press run, type in mrt, and ok then run it.|||um malwares transfer your login infos, your bank account infos, and any info that you put in like credit card numbers, social security numbers. They just send it to their developers.|||In my opinion, the most dangerous malware doesn't make money.





The most dangerous malware is the kind that makes zombies out of computers. It takes control of the computer and adds it to a network of other computers (called a botnet). These computers simply wait around for instructions. These instructions could do anything from tell the computers to erase their hard drives to launching a denial of service attack designed to take down key parts of the internet (as a form of terrorist attack).





While most botnets are relatively benign, they could be very dangerous. Some botnets have been reported to have hundreds of thousands of members. This could easily cause catastrophic damage to the internet, bringing down large parts of the internet for hours or days.





The good news is that most cyber "super-criminals" are interested in making money with their botnets. They don't want to take down the internet, they like it too much. So they will call up Mid-sized Internet Company X and say, "Hey, give me $10,000 or I put you out of business for a couple days." At that point, Mid-sized Internet Company X (MICX) says, "Yeah, sure." The criminal then tells their 20,000 computer botnet to start making repeated requests to MICX's website. This traffic (known as a Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDoS attack for short), overloads MICX's servers and brings them down for a couple hours, costing MICX hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. The criminal then calls back, MICX wires them the extortion money, and life goes on. Chances are that if the criminal was careful, they'd never get caught.





There are other ways that botnets and other malware incarnations can be used to make money, such as with some versions of Conficker, where it (ironically) told people they had a "virus" and offered to "remove" it (for a fee).





The difference between those two examples is that in the latter case, the user with the infected computer is the victim. In the former case, the victim was NOT infected. Therefore, it should be noted that you don't have to be infected by malware to be a victim of its existence. It's in everyone's best interest to keep the internet clear of such nonsense. Which is why I help people out on Y!A. Because you never know when their infected computer is going to hurt MY company.|||The programs that can hide their presence on the host Operating System (OS) and using stealth technologies allowing malicious activity to remain undetected on a computer running it. Called rootkits. Exactly what AVG-free does Not protect against.


A rootkit, allows users to log into the system, but also provides a backdoor root-level password for the attacker.


Lies about specific ports used by the attacker, masking the fact that a process is listening there.


Lies about available disk space, hiding the sectors taken up by attacker's tools and sniffer logs.


Those are just a few...|||Rootkits are the worst.