This post is the first in a series about the myths that Indian netizens have about Computers, Mobiles, the Internet, and Cyber Space. While there are claims that Digital India is supposedly growing in the metropolitan cities, the real Digital India is living in disconnected and blacked-out zones—the zones of awareness.

“We need to progress!”

Yes! Such sentences and other big, heavy words have been talked about and spoken at many confluences. However, action can only be brought through awareness. Our belief lies in the fact that Awareness and Sensitization is the key to Cyber Safety.

So what is this myth number one?

Virus

People have this one common way of addressing anything that goes wrong with their computers or mobiles: “I have a virus in my device. Oh my God! I might need to get it formatted.”

The first thing you are going to do as an end user is go to a shop nearby and hand over your device. The guy at the shop will speak some heavy words to you and charge you a good amount of money for doing nothing. If you are not among the lot, believe me, there is a huge number of people who still practice this.

First things first, troubleshoot and research your problem online and try to find out “how to” articles about fixes. Even then there are a lot of other things you can do. Only approach a local vendor in case of a real hardware problem. For any help needed, you can always ping us on WhatsApp on our helpline number @ +917832085146.

Anyway, the Virus is just a small part of other Malware that can attack your device. Remember, a virus is a notorious piece of code that can of course cause in-house damage to your system but trust me on this; it is not the real threat to you these days.

The best piece of example about viruses was the pen drive folder.  The folder virus automatically creates executable files with names and icons of the folders in the pen drive. This is solved through updates.

Malware

The real threat today is malware, especially the ones used to target the victim. Even a lot of firewalls, IPSs, and Anti-Malware programs cannot detect such malware. The essential difference is the fact that state-of-the-art malware attacks are more lively. Attackers embed them into different file types and abstract them. They are often persistent i.e. they stay on your machine after you believe you have removed them and even attack your system kernel (the underlying component of your device entirely not the Operating System) sometimes. Malware often has connections embedded into it that can allow an attacker—sitting in some other part of the world—access to your device. That is how there has come up a new set of attacks called ransomware. I have personally witnessed ransomware wipe laptops clean and encrypt drives without the user’s knowledge.

So to conclude, virus is a part of Malware. However, it has now remained long dead. As we step into the digital space all guns blazing, we need to be aware of these things.

Many might just think, “Oh! It’s just a virus and malware. I know about all this! I don’t need to read.” However, these are rapidly evolving at great speeds. Therefore, we must catch up and be aware to be safe. To read more, you can look up our post Secure Yourself Against Malware.