Antivirus and Console Tools

In this video, we’re talking about antiviruses and console tools. So “ransomware damage costs will rise to $11.5 billion in 2019 and a business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 14 seconds at that time,” according to Cybersecurity Ventures. So that’s a pretty big number. That’s a lot of money. And for every 14 seconds, there’s a ransomware attack. So how easy is it to create a virus? Well, let’s take a look. So this is a very simple virus. It’s called a fork bomb virus. And I’m creating it with a text document. So I don’t recommend doing this, but this is for demonstration purposes only. So I have a text document. I’m just going to name it forkbomb.

And in the text, you could use any editor. We’re going to zoom in here to make it a little bit easier to see. I’m simply going to put forkbomb.bat on there. And then I’m going to save the file as a batch file and name it the same thing.

OK, then we save it. And this is now going to be a batch file.

So when we run the file here, you can see it trying to open itself over and over and over again. And what this essentially does is it’s similar to a denial of service attack. It’s constantly trying to open itself out, and eventually, I’m going to run out of resources. Now, I can kind of bloat this thing up. I can add some additional files in there and have it run over and over and over again, speed up the process a little bit. I could have it open up multiple files, multiple strings. And the same thing is going to happen eventually. It’s going to open so many things. It’s going to tie up so many resources.

The computer is eventually going to slow down and crash. And that is a really simple virus. I just used a text document, and I put one line in there - forkbomb.bat - and named it the same thing, saved it as a batch file. But that’s an example of a very simple virus. So there’s a lot of different types of viruses out there. There’s ransomware, scareware, Trojans, worms, polymorphic viruses - a lot of different viruses out there doing a lot of different things. Well, on the security side, there’s no shortage of antivirus software out there - AVG, ESET, ClamAV, Panda, Windows Defender. There’s a lot of antiviruses. And there’s free versions, and there’s paid versions.

And it doesn’t matter what computer you’re on. If you’re on Windows, Linux, OS X, you should have an antivirus, and there is an antivirus out there for your operating system. Now, the argument I used to hear from people is - “Well, I’m on Linux. I don’t need a antivirus. I am on Mac. There are no viruses.” Truth of the matter is there’s viruses for every type of operating system. And the more popular that operating system becomes, the more enticing it becomes for malicious hackers to attack. This is why we need to have an antivirus installed on our computer.

Now, again, there are free and paid versions of a lot of the software out there. And again, Linux, Windows, OS X, they all have antiviruses that are going to work with that operating system. Most antivirus software nowadays will also scan for malware. The majority will also scan for ransomware. Some - mostly enterprise level - antiviruses will have some sort of online console that we could view our protected machines. Enterprise antivirus software will generally also have more features and allow for things like remote install of their software. They can remotely view computers, initiate antivirus scans, clean computers remotely, alert you when something happens, things like that. Antivirus software is also a simple and oftentimes cheap way of protecting your network.

After all, there’s a lot of viruses out there - viruses, worms, ransomware, and whatnot. In addition to having things like your computer patched, your users locked down, antivirus software is just another piece of software you can have to have an extra layer of protection there that’s really worth having.