Another Day With My PC

Believe it or not, the number of people that are starting to think that malware attacks are loosing steam is growing. Many cite the fact that the incidence of hard drive wipe outs are diving to their lowest levels since the PC became a common household appliance.

While it is true that data wipe outs are not that rampant anymore, this doesn’t mean that malware infection is going down, too. Gone are the days when all hackers do is try to wreak havoc to your system by offering to reformat or clean your storage device for free. Aside from the fact that it isn’t fun to make somebody’s life miserable anymore, such deed also nets zero profit.

What hackers are trying to do right now is to get data rather than eradicate them. Indeed, information-gathering is a very profitable undertaking, especially if such data involves sensitive ones, such as bank account or credit card numbers.

So don’t be deceived by the seeming lack of hard drive wipe outs during the past few years. The danger hasn’t passed, and we’re not experiencing the calm before the storm either. The calm is the storm! The malware of old is very different from the ones that are trying to get into our PC at present. The unwanted applications that we’re fending off right now work discreetly, looking for data that could turn zeroes and ones to $1s with 0s.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 8:20 am and is filed under PC Security, Malware . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.