This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Sunbelt Software for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
I’m giving away one free VIPRE Antivirus software license (Virus Intrusion Protection Remediation Engine). To enter in the contest, simply email me within 24 hours of when this is posted and indicate you’d like to be entered into the drawing. A winner will be randomly chosen from those entries shortly after 24 hours from when this article is posted. I’m also giving away another VIPRE license over at Misconception Junction’s sister site, Today I Found Out, So if you enter there, you’ll have two chances to win.
VIPRE has the lowest surveyed infection rate of any antivirus vendor and is an ICSA and VB100 certified anti-virus software provider. This means that their anti-virus software was independently tested and shown to detect 100% of virus and malware samples thrown at it and generated no false positives while scanning and that it also provides a complete suite of tools to protect the user from virus and other computer attacks (anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-rootkit, firewall, etc.).
The other key point that puts VIPRE above its competitors is that, unlike most other premium virus protection software out there, it does not bog down your system and takes a minimalistic approach to using system resources to accomplish its job of protecting your machine. This particularly makes VIPRE one of the few viable premium anti-virus choices for users of netbooks and older computers that don’t have a lot of resources available.
VIPRE also comes with free U.S. based technical support and has a 96% customer satisfaction rate.
Bonus Factoids:
- One of the first major computer virus attacks and one of the first to use email as its method of propagating itself was “Melissa”, which was a virus released in March of 1999 that infected user’s computers when they opened a Word document attachment in an email sent to them. The virus would then be sent to the first 50 people in the users address book. By the time it was eradicated Melissa is estimated to have done about $80 million worth of damage.
- The author of the Melissa virus, David Smith, was sentenced to a 10 years in prison, though only ended up serving a little over a year and a half due to helping the F.B.I. track down various hackers.
- About a year after “Melissa” came “code red” in July of 2001. This virus was much more sophisticated than Melissa, but was not targeted at end users, rather, web servers running IIS. It operated on a three stage cycle. First, it would scan for computers to try to find some that would be vulnerable to the bug it was exploiting in IIS. Next it would then attempt to run malicious code meant to corrupt files and code on the systems. Finally, it would go into sleep mode, which made it harder to detect. This was an extremely effective worm that was infecting as many as 2000 machines per minute at its very brief peek, though the damage was ultimately limited due to it being easily avoided with a simple fix. The total damage though was estimated at $1.2 billion thanks to the fact that it targeted web servers. Unlike with Melissa though, Code Red’s author(s) were never caught.
- The grandaddy of them all, in terms of damages was the “Love Bug” released in 2000 which caused several billion dollars in damages. This bug spread itself around by sending itself to all emails in a user’s address book when the user clicked to open the “love letter” purportedly sent from someone they know. The love bug originated in the Philippines, created by a 24 year old student who was never convicted of anything because, at the time, there were no laws against what he did in the Philippines.
- The term “virus”, as referring to self replicating computer programs, was coined by Frederick Cohen who was a student at California’s School of Engineering. He wrote such a program for a class. This “virus” was a parasitic application that would seize control of the computer and replicate itself on the machine. He then specifically described his “computer virus” as: “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself.” Cohen went on to be one of the first people to outline proper virus defense techniques. He also demonstrated in 1987 that no algorithm could ever detect all possible viruses.
Sources:
And the winner is…. (drum roll) Jeff S.