How Hackers Spread Malware and Virus

Do you know that thousands of Computers are being infected with some kind of Trojan/Malware each second as we speak? And no, it’s not only the Windows Users that’s being targeted nowadays; even Operation Systems like i0S and Linux are now the favourite hunting grounds for hackers.
What’s the root cause of such massive computers falling prey to malwares? The answer is Ignorance and lack of awareness among the general public. The biggest misconception among the people is, since they have a “Premium” Anti-Virus installed in their computer, they are 100% secure. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Antivirus provides protection only from the known viruses but what about the unknown and new ones? Do you know, hundreds of new viruses are being coded and released every day? To make it worse, there exist special types of software called Crypters which makes a known virus Fully UnDectected(FUD) without changing the behaviour of the virus, in some cases adding more teeth to them.
Some Underground hacking communities even provide tutorials and ebooks on how to infect people. Some ebooks even claim to “teach you” how to infect 1000+ computers on a single day. While others who already have a massive amount of computers under his control sells the bots for as little as 2$ per thousand bots. More about such ebooks can be found at the end of this article.

Let’s have a look at the top Four ways in which Malware and Virus are spread:

1). Torrents

I bet you saw this coming. But do you know the latest movie which you ripped last night and seeding it away in glory right now could potentially be a carrier of viruses? Yes, it’s possible if your computer was already infect by a virus which had the capability of binding itself to torrent files. Looking at it from the other side, the trusted members of a torrent site could also theoretically infect you without them even known it. Not to mention about bogus and fake files binded with viruses uploaded every day to torrent site by fake profiles. The point is danger is always lurking on Torrent sites. They best to minimise them is to take precautions while downloading torrents. Always check the uploader, his previous uploads, the comments given by other users and how old the torrent is. It’s also a good idea to google the name of the torrent and check its description and pictures with those given in the Torrent site.

2). Youtube

Youtube and Dailymotion: Search “ ‘Any Software name here’ Crack” in  Youtube or DailyMotion, you will be literally flooded with hundreds of video tutorials showing you how to run the crack file. Almost 90% of the videos will be accompanied by a download link and in most of the cases the file offered in the download link will be binded with a Trojan. Use your common sense in such cases.

3). Facebook

Yes, you read that right. With over 901 million active users at the end of March 2012, Facebook is one of the favourite hunting grounds for hackers. They are actively pulling out new and innovative tricks to lure the users into downloading their virus. Be those spammy links like “OMG! I can’t believe this!” or  “Go to this website to get your free iPhone”, they are constantly coming up with clever ideas to entice the users in click their malicious links. So they next time you are tempted to click on a link in Facebook, think twice about it.

4). Chat Room

 This method is also rampant on the internet right now. There are thousands of chatrooms, right from Omegle, Yahoo to numerous teen chat rooms. Most of the time it’s not even a  human but an automated software called bot that does all the spamming of the chatrooms with infected links. This is a very easy method and requires little or no effort on part of the hacker to infect hundreds of users within a single day. It’s better to avoid such chatrooms whenever possible, if not, then make it a point to never click any link on such chatrooms next time you visit.

Remember I told about the premium ebooks about spreading malwares sold on Underground forums at the beginning of the article. Due to the nature of the materials written there, it can’t be published on a public blog but I have given a download link. It contains the top malware spreading guides which got leaked but limited to only a few people.
Due to prevent mass abuse of the ebooks, the ebooks are uploaded in a server that requires you to complete a small 60 second survey in order to download them. You make ask, I don’t spread Viruses, Do I need them?  There is a saying, “To catch the thief, Think like a Thief.”