The term Malware is widely being used but only a few people understand what it really stands for. It is used to denote all the malicious programs that the hackers use to control another user’s computer without their knowledge or consent for illegal purposes. It is not necessary that you must download something into your system to get infected with adware, spyware or a virus. Once infected with any of these, your computer will show several symptoms like slow running, a lot of pop up ads and crashes.

It covers a wide range of destructive programs from the simple adware to the suspicious spyware that permits strangers to have access to your system and commit crimes under your internet name and online identity.

The dangers of this program begin when you unknowingly download it into your computer considering it as useful software. Well unfortunately most of them are in disguises to increase your rate of risk. Some of them come in the form of alluring offers like ‘download the fastest search engine for free’. An irony that you can find in such cases is the way in which they are presented to you. There are Malwares that are sold out as anti-malware programs and the creators of the same do websites just like the legitimate ones.

This malicious program may also find its way into a system through Active X controls that have the capacity to even change the system registry. It can also take the charge of several computer operations.

Even the most popularly used web browsers are not free of such programs when we come know that the toolbars and screen savers are some of the favorite places for those to hide. You can get infected with a malicious program from a video or an image from any website or link that is used or visited by millions of people over the world. Thus it’s a reality that millions of computers are getting infected day by day.

The dangers or risks of such a program cannot be predicted as the threat rate can differ with different programs. In a lower threat the risk is minimized to impediment in the computer performance. In a virus attack your system operations will suffer variously and in higher and much dangerous risks will put your name and fame into wrong hands.

Some of the major functions of this devastating program is as follows:

1. The transmission of personal and private information to an unknown server.
2. Undesirable advertising.
3. Redirection to a commercial website when you enter a wrong domain name by mistake.
4. Seizing the homepage of the user to make it a phishing site.
5. Making alterations in the security settings of the system and lastly,
6. Shrinking the system performance as a whole.

The program is unauthorized and works without your knowledge and consent. So to tackle a possible risk or threat it is desirable to do virus scan regularly or at least once in a week.