You usually come to know that your computer is zombie-infested too late. In the case of a virus infection on your computer, you usually come to know about it through the unexpected effects that are observed by you while you are using your computer.
The symptoms are usually that your computer does no longer work the way it was working earlier.
Sometimes a virus can cause some of your document files to show absolute trash contents, When you open a document file such as an MS Word file, it shows meaningless symbols and characters, whereas, you are positive that its contents were earlier meaningful when you had typed in that letter of yours to your friend.
A virus usually disturbs the address locations of specific entities on the computer's registers. This causes meaningless characters or symbols to appear in those memory locations. Such a zombie program can replicate and hide itself in your computer's system files folder.
Usually, what a latest virus does before it starts all its damaging effects is to disable your antivirus program, irrespective of whether it is Norton's, McAfee, Kaspersky, BitDefender, or AVG. So, if you find on booting your computer that your antivirus program is disabled, and when you know that you had not disabled it yourself, you can straightaway attribute it to a virus.
A virus can sometimes cause a disturbance in your computer's booting process. In such a case, you will usually get a message that a certain file was not found or that a certain memory address could not be accessed. A blue screen of death (BSOD) during the booting of your computer is sometimes a clear indication that a virus program has played foul with the operating system files.
Alternatively, a virus can cause your computer to work very slowly. The reason is that the virus is replicating itself and disturbing memory location addresses. The result of this is that the hard disk takes a long time to search for a certain memory address.
Even if your computer has the best antivirus installed and all the latest virus definitions are fully updated, it is no guarantee that your computer is safe from a zombie army attack. The reason is that most antivirus programs neutralize only viruses, but not spyware and adware. So, it is important to install at least three good anti-spyware programs on your computer in addition to a good antivirus program.
You can be sure of a spyware zombie attack, if you can no longer access your Internet connection and you have already ruled out all the other causes of Internet access inability. This is only one symptom. Another is unexpected and intensive CPU (central processing unit) activity that slows down system performance. You can be sure of an adware infestation on your computer if you find many advertisement windows popping up on your computer's window while you are online. You can be sure of a phishing attempt on your computer if you find an e-mail message asking for pin number of your credit card or username password details of your Internet banking account.
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