At the top of San Francisco, on Valencia Street, is one of the city's leading defenses against the war on malware: a computer repair shop owned by Del Jaljaa.
Users take their infected computers to Jaljaa for repair 5 to 10 times a day, desperate for help, so that he can restore them to working condition. Malware has increased in recent years and is the main part of his work.
Malware infections, including computer viruses and worms, are keeping computer technicians busy, thanks to their exponential growth in recent years. The list of viruses from AV-Test, a company that tests the effectiveness of antivirus software, was enriched in 2014 with more than 143 million new entries, 72 percent more than the previous year, according to a report released last Thursday.
On the other hand, we have had more new malware in the last two years than in the last ten, a fact that has been observed by both Malwarebytes and Kaspersky. The latter even reports that attacks on mobile devices have increased significantly in 2014 compared to 2013.
For years, antivirus programs could block dangerous scripts based on the code they were written in. But hackers found a new way to bypass them. Now they can freely purchase or download malware code. Then they can change exactly the points in the code they want, so the new code is invisible to antivirus programs.
Experts say that the only way for users to protect themselves is to have installed and updated antivirus on their computers, and also to be careful while browsing the Internet and not open suspicious websites and email. After all, we live in an era where viruses circulate within ads from large networks, such as Yahoo News.
