When Malware Hits Home

Everyone has heard some discussion of the growing and serious dangers that malware poses in our digital age. Bank accounts, lines of credit, personal information and even one’s identity can be stolen via malicious programs designed for such purposes. It is even likely you know someone who has been a victim of such an attack. The frequency and capabilities of these attacks have increased with rate of other software advancements and current levels of sophistication can easily pass basic security measures.

Imagine this scenario: You receive an email from a friend or coworker, within that email you find a standard message/attachment combo with something like an Excel or PowerPoint presentation being the attachment. This message attracts no extra scrutiny and you open it and determine that it is unimportant, think nothing of it and go about your day. However, unbeknownst to you, when that attachment opened a virus or some other piece of malware entered your computer, specifically your email account, and has access to resend itself or follow any other preprogrammed courses of action. This plays out delay across our world with immeasurable consequences. Think of all the sensitive and critical information stored in an average email account. If that information falls into the wrong hands it could result in significant losses. Even the best case is that the virus simply continues spreading itself using your email account as a temporary host.

If you don’t like how this sounds, be thankful. Most email platforms and operating systems include tools that combat malware, which is why these programs exploit email attachments and other non-suspect portals of entry. If security is breached, signs of infection are noted, and that frantic email to ‘All Contacts’ has been sent explaining what happened and to promptly delete any emails they receive from the account, it is probably time to bring in outside help to restore your email account to its non-infected form. Users of online emailing platforms that are constantly connected to the provider and are updated automatically will likely have issues like this cleaned up for them. Those who run their own email platform software like Microsoft Outlook, can count on the inbox repair tool, This application can rapidly examine all types of Outlook files to find signs of data corruption and infection,Outlook repair and can completely restore an Outlook account.

Dangerous software will always seek to exploit gaps in user security, but there are clear steps to take to avoid these occurrences. Even in the event of infection, most issues can be resolved with the implementation of proper response procedure. Keep calm and cautious to protect and recover your information.

Alan Chen is President and Chairman of DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including word recovery, excel repair, outlook repair and sql recovery software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com.

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