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Malware Basics – Part 1

Posted on January 9th, 2009

Part 1 – Recognizing an Infection
Part 2 – Incident Response Plans and Procedures

Introduction

We’ve all been faced with the following situation at one time or another.  Imagine you’ve just walked in the door of your office, and one of your coworkers comes up to you complaining that his computer is running slowly.  You tell him that is normal in the morning, but then he says his web browser keeps popping up new windows and then crashing.  Of course, he forgets to mention that he was on a flash game website when it all started, until you get to his desk and discover this for yourself.  So, now what do you do?  You suspect this machine has a virus or some other type of malware, but you aren’t sure.  The computer has fully-updated virus definitions and a full system scan didn’t find any malware.  But is the machine safe?

In Part 1 of Malware Basics, we’re going to review some signs that a machine may have malware.  Then we will go over some useful tools for identifying suspicious files even if your antivirus suite does not detect anything.  Finally, we’ll talk about how to identify what type of malware you found.  Part 2 of this series will deal with Malware Incident Response.