7 Types of Malware

Malware has come a long way since the humble computer virus. We look at the seven types of malware (as defined by Cisco) and learn what they do and how they work, as well as how to protect your computer devices from malicious code.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and how the tech are you So? On the tech
Stuff news episodes, I often end up talking about stories

(00:25):
involving malware, and I'm guessing you're all aware of malware
at least to some degree. If you work for a
company like mine, you'll hear about malware several times a month,
as we have an extremely proactive I T security team
that works hard to keep employees up to speed on
the dangers of malware and the various tactics used to

(00:47):
deliver payloads to targets. But I figure it's always good
to do a quick rundown on different variations of malware
and what they do. Now, keep in mind, well I'll
be talking about broad categories. You can sometimes find examples
of specific malware that kind of belonged to more than

(01:07):
one type or category. And I'm really I'm using categories
that are identified by Cisco because you have to take
definitions from somewhere. But as it turns out, because of
these similarities between different types, you can sometimes find other
companies that will define them in a slightly different way,
but I figure your Cisco is a pretty good authority

(01:31):
to build this episode off of. Just keep in mind,
if you do your own research, you might find variations
on what we'll be talking about here. So starting off,
before we even get into the different kinds, let's define malware,
so that term is short for malicious software malware. Back

(01:52):
in the early days of computing, I always just heard
of viruses, and you know, viruses are a subcategory. There
are a type of malware, and I actually to this
day still have to focus to refer to malicious software
as malware instead of just doing the lazy thing and
calling them all viruses. Because when I was a kid

(02:16):
and personal computers were first becoming a thing, that's what
we referred to all malicious software. It was all of virus,
partly because networking was not really a thing with personal
computers in the early days. So anyway, old habits die hard.
That's why I sometimes will still do it. But uh,
as I said, we'll see that virus is one subset

(02:36):
of malware. And because we're talking malicious software and not
just cheeky programs that are meant to cause mischief. We
typically will say that cyber criminals are the ones responsible
for developing the software in the first place, and they
may or may not be the same cyber criminals who
actually distribute the malware. Now, many folks will use the

(02:58):
word hacker to stand in for cyber criminal, but I
object to that because it implies that hackers collectively are
bad people. But if you'll forgive me a short tangent,
I'd like to explain why that's not really the case.
So the word hacker in the context of someone who

(03:20):
works with code dates back to the late nineteen fifties
and early nineteen sixties at m i T the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in other words, and it an originated
of the college's Tech Model Railroad Club or t m
r C. In fact, there's this humorous definition that Peter R.

(03:41):
Sampson created for the term hack, which then could be
extended to hacker. And the definition for hack, according to Sampson,
is this hack something done without constructive end, a project
undertaken on bad self advice, an intrope booster, or to

(04:02):
produce or attempt to produce a hack. So noun and
a verb, and I do not wish to put words
into Mr Sampson's mouth, but I believe he may be
using the word entropy here to specifically refer to a
decline into general disorder. Anyway, the blossoming field of computer
science took on hacker to mean people who were putting

(04:25):
together code, sometimes fruitlessly, as they were trying to get
a system to do something specific, Like they had a
specific goal they were working toward, and they were hacking
their way to getting that goal to come true. And
you know, the early days of computer science there was

(04:46):
a lot of trial and error when it came to
writing code that could achieve a specific purpose. There are
a lot of early programs that essentially did what they
set out to do, but on careful review of the code,
as as Jonathan Colton might say, it is not elegant, uh,

(05:06):
and it does not really do the goal efficiently, and
that you know, it's it's really a poorly programmed piece
of code, except for the fact that it actually does
achieve what it set out to do. Now, later on,
the word hacker would be used to describe curious folks
who just wanted to know how different technological stuff works, like,

(05:27):
for example, how does a telephone network route calls. These
hackers would explore technology and technological systems. They would learn
all about the quirks of those pieces of tech, you know,
what made them tick, and perhaps most importantly, how to
make the tech do stuff it wasn't necessarily intended to do,

(05:50):
Because there's something really satisfying about figuring out a way
to achieve a result using tech that wasn't you know,
built to do that thing. It I think it kind
of taps into the same part of our brains for
the people who really enjoy doing things like designing Rube
Goldberg devices. Those are those needlessly complex devices that are

(06:14):
designed to carry out some uh trivially simple task. Well,
I think the same thing that that pleases folks who
really love Rube Goldberg devices is what pleases people to
learn how the system works and then find ways to
exploit it to do something different, not necessarily something bad,

(06:36):
but different anyway. The word hacker really is more general
than the specific use case of, you know, people who
make malicious software, or even person who wants to infiltrate
a secure system. There are hackers who fall into those subcategories,
but I wouldn't use hacker as a broad stroke brush

(06:59):
to say person with malicious intent. Um, but frequently that's
how we encounter the word in the media. And you know,
language is fluid, Language does evolve, so it could very
well be that I'm trying to hold back a flood
and I should just accept that. Hacker effectively now means
jerk face who wants to ruin your day, or maybe

(07:21):
ruin your computer, or maybe the company you work for,
or maybe the country you live in. It can get
pretty scary. Now, one other thing before we start to
dive into the categories. The folks who distribute malware are
not necessarily the same folks who built the malware. They
can be, but they don't have to be. There are

(07:45):
malware programmers for higher out there. We could actually call
them hacks, because one of the definitions of hack is
a person who does you know, work for higher It's
kind of like the gig economy, and often we associate
it with someone who does, you know, like bare minimum
quality work and does a lot of it in order

(08:08):
to make a living. So like a hack, writer is
someone who generates an awful lot of writing but isn't
necessarily deeply concerned about the quality of their work. So
we could refer to these malicious coders for higher as
hackers in that sense, slightly different context from what we

(08:30):
were talking about earlier. Now, these programmers go on to
create malicious software and then frequently they will sell it
on a dark market, like on the dark Web, where
people are are looking for pieces of malware that they
specifically want to use to target either a specific target

(08:52):
or general target, and they have a specific goal that
they want to achieve. Uh. Sometimes they'll even make a
software available for free for distribution, but more often than
not you'll find it as like a pay for tool,
a weapon you can use in your arsenal. Now, often
cyber criminals who purchase these pieces of malware will then

(09:16):
go on to tweak that malware put their own spin
on it. So very frequently we will find lots of
variations of certain types of malware, and if you do
a forensics investigation into the malware, you will discover that
there are some common threads of DNA among different types

(09:38):
of malware. That can also be useful because if there
are common elements between different distributions of malware, it can
be easier to scan for that malware and detect it
before it does too much damage. Um, the more different
a version is from its origin point, the more likely

(10:00):
it is going to escape immediate detection. This is one
of the reasons why anti virus software, which we will
talk about towards the end of this episode, is really
important because we get new variations on old malware all
the time, and if it's if it's a dramatic enough
departure from the original piece of malware, your anti virus
program may not pick up on it. So these things

(10:23):
have to be you know, investigated and then updated frequently. Okay,
I think we have laid all the groundwork we need
to lay. When we come back, we're gonna start with
the various types of malware and we'll we'll get it
going with a good old computer virus. But first let's

(10:45):
take this quick break, all right. As I said, we're
going to start with the computer virus. So the heck
is a virus within the context of malware. So a
virus is a piece of malicious software that gloams onto

(11:08):
a file that supports some form of macros like you know,
most document files do this, and so this this malicious
code is piggybacking on top of a file and it
is like a virus inside of a host. The host
in this case is the file that contains the malicious code,
and when someone opens up that file that has the

(11:31):
virus attached, it can activate the virus. So the file
that you're opening appears to be legit or safe, but
the malicious code that's within the the file then gets
to run rampant on your machine. Now, the goal of
your typical virus is to disrupt a computer system in
some way. Now may do this by placing a very

(11:54):
large demands on computer memory. So now your computer can't
really run anything properly because it's memory is completely taken
up by dealing with this virus. Or it might replicate
itself and or otherwise replicate nonsense information and fill up
your computer storage with garbage data. And it may even
overwrite files so that you can no longer access key

(12:17):
data or programs. That kind of thing. By the way,
overwriting files, that's like scorched Earth policy, because if you
delete a file, it doesn't actually leave your machine. The
deleted file is essentially marked by your computer as this
area of storage is now available, so we can write
over it if we want to. But if you haven't

(12:39):
overwritten anything. You can still retrieve deleted files. Overwriting files
makes retrieval way more difficult. There are entire forensics companies
out there that will take great strides to try and
retrieve information from overwritten files, but it's very hard to do. Uh.

(13:00):
A common feature of computer viruses is that they do
self replicate. That is a pretty standard uh component of
of computer viruses, and again they typically do that to
kind of gum up with a computer with copies of itself. Okay,
next up, let's talk about trojan's sometimes also called trojan viruses.

(13:21):
They do share some similarities with your bog standard viruses
that we just talked about. A trojan is malware disguised
as a legitimate file or program. So maybe you are
prompted to download a video player because you're trying to
play some sort of online content online media, but you're

(13:43):
getting a message saying, hey, you need to download this
media player if you want to watch this. Well, in
some cases, not in all of them. Sometimes this is
a legitimate message, but frequently this is a tactic that
criminals use to convince you to download a file that's
acte a trojan that's housing malicious software. Back in the

(14:04):
heyday of media piracy, there were lots of trojans disguised
as useful programs, so everything from pirated video games, to
productivity software suites, to even anti virus packages. Clever go
you would go and say, Hey, I don't want to
pay for this expensive piece of software, I'm gonna find

(14:24):
it online for free. There was a chance that the
free version you found was actually a trojan that was
housing malicious software. Now, typically once a person downloads the
trojan and then activates it, the trojan jumps in to
get access to sensitive data on the computer or computer device.

(14:46):
It might have some code that sends that data back
to the jerks who distributed the malware in the first place.
That kind of falls into another category we'll talk about
a bit later. So in those cases, the militia software
is collecting information that someone else should absolutely not have
access to. Could be your personal information, could be stuff

(15:08):
like your bank account, could be your medical records, could
be any combination of these, could be everything on your computer.
Really Now, something else that a trojan virus might have
within it is what's called a root kit attack. So
root kit it's attacking the root of your operating system
and the purpose of this is to give a cyber

(15:31):
criminal access to your machine, almost as if the cyber
criminal was sitting down at your keyboard directly. And when
a criminal gets administrative access to a computer, that's super
bad news. It can also lead to the criminal not
only just compromising one machine, but potentially launching attacks on
connected systems, so networked devices that that machine can is

(15:54):
connected to that could be the next vector of attack.
Trojan malware is often the delivery system for other specific
subcategories of malware, such as ransomware. So let's go ahead
and do that one now because it is so closely connected.
So this is category number three. We've had virus, we
have trojan virus. Now we have ransomware. And it's been

(16:16):
in the news a lot over the last couple of years.
There's been some high profile ransomware attacks over the last
few years. And it's similar in many ways to viruses,
and that the goal is to cut off access to
important programs, files, folders, entire directories, that kind of thing.
But the way it goes about this is slightly different

(16:37):
from viruses. So once ransomware has been injected into a
computer system, it will run an encryption program and it
will encrypt data on part or all of the computer system.
Often it will encrypt data on any part of the
computer system it can get access to, so the computer's
user will be unable to access those encrypted files because

(17:00):
to the computer all that data will just appear to
be gibberish. It won't look like useful files or programs,
it will just look like random data. And the companying
message will alert the user that some criminal has locked
away important stuff on this computer and that only by
paying a ransom, typically in some form of cryptocurrency, will

(17:22):
the user regain access to their programs and files. This
can also end up being a type of blackmail as
well for personal stuff. Like let's say that you have
your computer. You're not necessarily part of some big company,
but you get by ransomware, and the people who have
locked away your data are saying, hey, if you don't
want sensitive stuff on here leaked to the public, you've

(17:46):
gotta pay me. So that this can also come in
the form of blackmail. Well, what they're saying is if
you pay us, then we will give you the key
that will allow you to access your programs and files. Again. Uh,
so the criminal can grant access by sharing this mathematical key,
and that does allow for decryption, you can reverse the

(18:06):
encryption process and regain your files and programs and turn
it back into useful stuff. So the criminal is essentially
holding a user's programs and files or directories or whatever
hostage until they get paid a ransom. Now I've said
this many times on tech news episodes, but it bears repeating.
It is pretty much always a bad idea to pay

(18:29):
the ransom. It can be very hard to resist the
urge to pay to get to regain control of your systems,
but it's bad to do because paying reinforces that method
of attack. If criminals see that ransomware can make them money,
even if it only works one time out of five

(18:49):
times or anything like that, well that could be enough
to keep these attacks going. It's it's proven to work,
so they're going to keep doing it. So paying ransoms
really just ensures that more attack X will follow in
the future, maybe not directly against you, but definitely against others. Also,
another thing you need to keep in mind is the
victim can never be really sure that the criminal is

(19:11):
actually going to hand over the key needed to decrypt
the data. They could just take the money and run
and leave you with an encrypted system and then you
don't really have any options. You can try and decrypt it,
but like decryption programs can take a lot of computational
processing and a ton of time. This is one of

(19:31):
the things that quantum computers will completely transform in the future,
but we're not there yet. Well, criminals could do that.
It is risky for a criminal to just take the
money and run because if folks figure out who carried
out the attack, even if it's just like in general terms,
like you kind of know what hacker network was likely

(19:52):
responsible for the attack, well, that sends a message to
future victims that even if they pay the ransom, they'll
still get stuck. So there's no point in hang. So
criminals are not likely to hold back on it, but
it is a possibility still. It's always a bad idea
to really pay the ransom, but it can be difficult
to hold off. Criminals like to target companies and organizations

(20:15):
that have critical sensitive data on them, which obviously ups
the stakes considerably. So hospitals and other healthcare facilities are
frequent targets because there are literal life and death situations
connected to that data. It is not easy to deny
a ransom. When you think that people's lives literally hold

(20:36):
in the balance, that's a difficult thing to do. Um
The same can be said of a lot of government
agencies that have really sensitive information that they need access to.
It is difficult to resist paying that ransom. There are
a lot of potential ways that ransomware can find its
way onto a system, from targeted attacks to more kind

(20:58):
of broad approaches, like a phishing scam can be a
very broadway to get ransomware onto machines. If you don't
know what fishing is, then you are a sweet summer child,
and I really hate to chip away at your innocence.
But a phishing attack is when criminals create what seems
to be a legitimate message, or legitimate website or email,

(21:20):
that kind of thing, but it actually directs people to
either voluntarily give up information that they should not give up,
such as like a bank account number and log in information,
or it will direct people to a link that will
have them download the malware. Okay, we've got a couple
more types to talk about, but before we get to that,

(21:42):
let's take another quick break. Okay, next up, we're gonna
talk about worms so not the squiggly little guys who
live in apples and that kind of thing. We're talking
computer worms. And a computer worm is malware designed to

(22:04):
replicate itself very quickly and then to spread across numerous
connected devices on a network. So it's only job really
is to replicate and infect, and to do that as
as widely and quickly as possible. So if one machine
on a network gets hit, others on that same network
are in immediate danger. But how does the initial attack happen?

(22:24):
How does the worm get on you know, patient zero
in the computer network. Well, unlike a virus, a worm
doesn't rely on a host file in order to execute
its attack, So this isn't a case where a file
like a PDF or something happens to be carrying a
worm as well. The worm can infect through a direct download,

(22:44):
or it can be injected through some other means, such
as on a USB drive. By the way, just in
case you haven't heard this for a while, never connect
some found USB drive to your computer. You never know
if the drive on that USB drive has some executable
code on it that's just waiting to infect a network. Anyway,

(23:07):
once the worm is on an infected system, it copies
itself and sends those copies to other machines on the network,
all with the goal of disrupting operations and or destroying
data in the process. So those are also bad news.
The next two types of malware are very similar, so
we're just gonna put them together. We're talking spyware and

(23:30):
add ware. So spyware, as the name suggests, is this
malicious software that runs in the background on a machine,
real secret like, and then it sends information back to
a remote user. You heard me talk about this kind
of with the trojan viruses. Spyware can be delivered via
trojan and the whole purpose is to send sensitive information

(23:53):
back to the criminal. So spyware can also include specific
stuff like key loggers. These are programs that, as the
name suggests, record or log every single key stroke made
on a computer, so the criminal back home can use
that information to figure out stuff like log in credentials,
you know, banking information, all sorts of stuff. Well made

(24:17):
spyware will not alert the target that something is wrong.
It doesn't necessarily impact computer performance that much, at least
not to a noticeable degree. So the goal is to
stay under the radar for as long as possible to
get as much information as possible. This, by the way,
is why I say that James Bond is a terrible,

(24:38):
terrible spy. I mean the guy goes around and introduces
himself everywhere he goes. He violates like rule number one
of spy ishness, so that spyware. But then what is
adwere well, similar to spyware, adware monitors your computer use,
but instead of using the information to steal your personal

(24:58):
details or gain access to your accounts, adware is spying
on you in order to serve up more applicable ads
to you. This can include stuff like even hijacking your
web browser so that when you open up your web browser,
your homepage is no longer whatever it was before, but

(25:18):
now it goes to some other site that's connected to
the adware creators or their distributors. This can also lead
down pathways to other types of malware, so adware, while
it is not necessarily malicious on its own, can lead
you to downloading stuff that is malicious. Um and as
much nastier machines can also get bogged down with adware.

(25:42):
So even if it's not outright malicious, if a lot
of different adware gets on your computer, it can start
to affect your computer's performance over time. So because it
has been used for malicious purposes, because it's often part
of the the entire strategy of attack that that criminals

(26:03):
are using, it gets lumped in as a version of malware,
so it's it's not necessarily malicious, but it's used frequently
enough to be included on lists of malware. And finally,
the last version we have is called fileless malware. Now,
as that name alright says, this malware is not attached

(26:25):
to some sort of file that you download off the internet. Instead,
this malicious code lives in computer memory, so as long
as the computer is on, the code can do whatever
it was designed to do. You know, malware does different
things depending upon the attackers goals, but it just lives
in your computer memory, which means that if you reboot

(26:47):
your computer, while rebooting clears computer memory. Right. Memory is volatile,
meaning that when you turn off your machine and then
turning back on, well, the memory has been wiped. It
was it was white clean as soon as you turned
it off, and when you turn it back on, you've
got a blank slate. That's good in the sense that
you could then eliminate the malware that was living in

(27:10):
your computer memory, but it also erases all trace of
the fileless malware, so it makes investigating and computer forensics
really challenging. There are ways, by the way, that cybercriminals
create to create persistent fileless malware, where then involves infecting
some element of your computers operating system so that every

(27:33):
time it boots up, it injects this malware back into
computer memory. So there are those versions as well. Those
obviously are easier to investigate because if you find that
that root code in the operating system, you know what's happening.
But how do you inject malicious code into computer memory
to start with? There are actually a lot of potential

(27:54):
delivery systems, including piggybacking onto other types of malware, so
that that's one possibility, But another one is to leverage
vulnerabilities in known legitimate pieces of software. These kind of
exploits allow criminals to lean on trusted code to deliver
malicious payloads, and we've seen an increase in that kind

(28:16):
of activity over the last couple of years. It's really insidious,
right because you trust the software. It's software from a
legitimate source. It is not designed to be malware. It's
maybe it's productivity software, maybe it's you know something, It
could even be something that your your organization has installed
onto your work computer. Right, you might not have had

(28:38):
any hand in that. But if there's a vulnerability in
there that has not yet been patched out, and a
criminal figures out how to exploit that to deliver payloads,
that can be the vector where you get things like
fouleless malware injected into machines. There's really nothing you can
do about it because the the solution is further up

(29:01):
the chain. It's over with the the designers of that
that software that's been exploited, and you need to get
an update patched out to fix that problem, and that's
not up to you most cases. So that's really the
breakdown of the different types of malware. As I mentioned,
the delivery systems for these attacks are varied. You can

(29:23):
get these types of malware in various ways. There's no
single vector that's used by each and they can also
be used in combination with one another. So how do
you protect yourself against all these kinds of malware? Well,
one thing to do is to practice good computer security etiquette,
which includes careful web browsing. That means, you know, you

(29:44):
make certain that the sites that you're visiting are legitimate
and you're not just clicking on random links that have
been sent to you from like strange email addresses or
messaging services or something like that, or even text messages.
I get a lot of uh spam text messages now
that are clearly attempting to get me to visit some
link and are a phishing scam. Uh. Same with email.

(30:08):
Gmail in particular, A lot of phishing attacks have been
coming to my Gmail address, and Gmail usually was pretty
good at weeding those things out, but every now and
then I get a new kind of slate of of
clearly clearly they're phishing attacks. They're not well made because

(30:30):
if you even just look at the scent field, like
who these emails are going to, you'll see like, oh,
they're literally just doing a dictionary attack of email addresses,
and mine just happens to be in that list. So
this is not some sort of personalized message, but it
is a way of trying to cast a very wide

(30:51):
net and at least get a few bites where I
guess that's mixing metaphors. But if you catches in that
in that effort um. But that's not the only thing
you need to think about when it comes to good
computer security etiquette. Another is being super careful about who
you allow to access your physical computer, because a lot

(31:11):
of the quote unquote hacking attacks that we hear about
are not actually the result of some hoodie wearing hacker
wearing fingerless gloves and tapping away on a keyboard in
a dark room somewhere, their face only lit by the
screen across from them. Instead, a lot of the hacking
attacks are carried out by people who just get physical

(31:31):
access to machines. Typically they do this by posing as
someone like an I T professional who comes around and says, Oh,
I need to update your computer with this new security
package or new software update, something like that. That's a
very common way to get access to a machine. So
it's always vitally important to verify that someone who's claiming

(31:54):
to be updating your machine is actually who they say
they are, that they are authorized to do this before
you allow it to happen, because countless attacks start through
this very kind of social engineering, rather than you know,
trying three times to guess the password and getting it
right on the third time. Anti virus software is also
an important piece um. This kind of software can affect

(32:18):
computer performance during scans in particular, and I know that
gets frustrating, but it's still a good idea to have it. Essentially,
anti virus software typically refers to a library of known
malicious code. So there's this growing database of all the
kinds of malware that have been found out in the
wild and identified by various security experts. So that library

(32:43):
is updated frequently. No matter which anti virus software you're
you're subscribed to or using, they are relying on a
library like this. Some of them are updated more frequently
than others. Some of them are better and have more
examples than others because new code is constant a being
churned out as far as malware is concerned. So your

(33:04):
antivirus programs scans your computer for evidence of these examples
of known malicious code, and if it finds one, it
will sequester and isolate that code to mitigate any harm,
and often will automatically remove the code as well. Some
programs might actually require you to give the command to
remove the malware, but it will isolate it so that

(33:26):
it can't do any more harm. And I know that
a lot of antivirus programs can get expensive. Goodness knows
that they can really be obnoxious. Once your subscription is
starting to get close to the end, you'll just get
notification after notification of hey, your protection is expiring, do
you want to renew? But they really are a good
component for computer security. UH. They're also free antivirus programs

(33:50):
out there, and you know they vary in quality, but
really some protection is better than no protection at all.
So if you can't afford to subscribe to a like
big name UH provider like Caspersky or Norton or something
like that, then you can at least look for a
good free anti virus suite out there. Also, would the

(34:15):
operating system that you use on your device will be
a big factor as to whether or not you should
really have anti virus on there. I I honestly think
that for pretty much any device outside of iOS, you
need anti virus. iOS you really don't, but everything else
you you kind of do. However, that being said, if
you use a Windows based machine, you absolutely should have

(34:38):
antivirus software on there. And the reason is not because
Windows is just inherently more vulnerable than other platforms. Although
you know mac OS is locked down pretty tightly. It's
because there are more Windows based machines out there than
anything else, which in turn means that when criminals are
designing malicious software, they want to have the biggest impact

(35:01):
they can possibly have, So they're going to be programming
their malicious software for the platforms that are the most
plentiful out there. When it comes to things like personal
computers and work computers, that tends to be Windows based machines.
So when you know that most of the malicious software
out there is being written for Windows devices and you

(35:22):
use a Windows device, then in turn tells you you
should probably have antivirus software installed on your machine just
because you're more likely to be a target. Um, but
you know there are other platforms out there and they
are not immune. Mac operating system, while it has a
great reputation because Apple really locks down its system and

(35:42):
makes it very difficult to gain access to it, there
are still examples of malware written specifically for Mac OS,
and they have been on the rise in recent years. Uh,
there were years where Apple was enjoying security through obscurity
to some extent, meaning the US there were so relatively
few Apple devices on the market malware authors weren't really

(36:06):
targeting those machines. But then but that that's no longer
really the case. And as I said, while Apple takes
a very lockdown approach compared to the much more open
approach to seeing things like Linux and Windows based machines,
it is not immune to malware. There are people who
still think that max are immune to malware. They are wrong,

(36:30):
so keep that in mind too. Anyway, that's the rundown
on the types of malware, and my my cry for
UH people to install antivirus software on their machines and
practice good computer security. There are other things you can do.
Having a firewall installed on your network is really important.

(36:50):
UM Using VPNs is a good idea too in many cases,
like the combination of VPNs and anti virus are good
ways to stay protected. Depending upon the nature of what
you do on your computer, you probably want to use
a VPN and anti virus software to protect yourself. This
includes companies that you know are allowing workers to work

(37:13):
remotely and deal with sensitive information that the company does
not want to leave company computers. These are important things
to keep in mind. So I just wanted to do that.
This was going to be a tech Stuff tidbits. But
we're coming up close to forty minutes at this point,
so once again I babbled too much. But if you

(37:33):
have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology personality and tech
maybe it's a specific gadget and it's evolution that you
would like me to talk about. Anything along those lines,
anything really tech oriented or how tech impacts us in
our lives, I'm happy to hear it. You can reach

(37:55):
out to me in a couple of different ways. One
way is to download the I Heart Radio app. It
is free to download, it's free to use. You can
navigate over to the tech Stuff part of the app
just by typing tech Stuff into the search field. There's
a little microphone icon there. If you click on that,
you can leave me a voice message up to thirties
seconds in length, and if you like, you can even

(38:16):
indicate if I can use the voice message in a
future episode of tech Stuff. I will never use any
voice message unless I get your express permission. You have
my word on that, because I mean, I know I
wouldn't want someone to play a message just because I
said something into a microphone unless I intended that message

(38:37):
to be played, which is a good thing considering what
I do for a living, or if you prefer not
to speak into a microphone, which is total legit. You
can still reach me on Twitter. The handle for the
show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart

(39:02):
Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.