Not a problem, just questions

I hope this is the right section/allowed on this forum. I don't actually have a computer problem I need fixed, rather I'm just trying to learn as much as I can. I know that the majority of this forum centers around helping specific problems, so I didn't know. Anyway, if it's ok/this is the right forum, here are some of my questions.

First, malware(I believe this is the most braud term, correct?) can be pretty much anything. It could be an independant program, it could "attatch" itself or "embed" itself into another program, be attatched or embedded into a simple file, pretty much anything, correct?

Second, are there many anti-virus programs out there that simply don't work or will even maybe lie in the free version to make you want to buy the full version? I've seen Stopzilla scan a computer and show litterally thousands of infections. Seems almost unreal. Of course, the computer obviously did have some problems, but... thousands?

Third, how does anti-virus software work? I'm sure they work different ways for different types of malware, but I assume that for stand-alone programs/malware it just deletes them and for "embedded" items it fixes the program code? I may be way off, but that's why I'm asking.

Fourth, assuming that I had a computer like I described in question #2... I needed some files from the computer. It would be unsafe to back up the computer, wipe the drive, and then reload the backup, because the backup would contain the viruses, correct? What about backing up only specific files? Is there a "safe list" of file types that for sure cannot contain viruses, or can viruses "attatch" themselves to any file or program type? What about scanning those specific files, saving only them to a flash drive or something, and then just loading those only onto a replacement/reformatted drive?

Sorry if this isn't what this board is for or if it's in the wrong place, but I'm eager to learn.

 

Hi unbanable,
Welcome to the Malware Forum!

Malware stands for Malicious Software. Please put the following question What is malware? into Google and look at some of the definitions for what malware is and how it's defined. There are systems of establishing degrees of maliciousness depending on the intent of the person who created the files which do harm to your computer. Unfortunately, while some malicious intent is part of the picture, incompetence can be just as successful at doing damage to your computer and so some malware can be traced to bad programming rather than malicious intent.

There is no one antivirus or antispyware program which can pick up every virus. The reason for this is because the viruses change so quickly. There are forums which collect and gather every single unknown file which comes to their attention and send it off to labs for analysis. Nevertheless, they each send it off to one lab and not all the labs share their information although there is a lot of cooperation among the forums in trying to track down which files are bad and how to get rid of them.

There are some forums which offer tutorials in learning about malware, for instance Bleeping Computers. Also, there are websites dedicated to keeping indexes of files where you can look up what they are, most notably CastleCops.

Reformatting and reinstalling is a good way to get rid of infected files that were on the harddrive. If you reinstall your programs from the original read-only cd's or re-download them from the internet, you can be quite safe in having a clean computer. However, if you back up your data and there are infected files in your data, your computer will get infected again. This is one reason we clean people's computers rather than having them simply reformat.

Infected files in the thousands. LOL Yes! This is possible. If a virus has the function of renaming files so they lose their function, for instance renaming all .exe files to be .scr files, then it can quickly reach the thousands with no problem. For viruses like this, you need a tool which simply reverses this problem. Generally, there are specific files which cause a virus to survive and if you can get rid of those, you can get the virus to stop.

I hope gives you a start.
abri