Suppose you observe that your home PC is responding very slowly to information r

Question

Suppose you observe that your home PC is responding very slowly to information
requests from the net. And then you further observe that your network gateway shows high levels of network activity, even though you have closed your e-mail client, Web browser, and other programs that access the net. What types of malware could cause these symptoms? Discuss how the malware might have gained access to your system. What steps can you take to check whether this has occurred? If you do identify malware on your PC, how can you restore it to safe operation?

Explanation / Answer

Consider the situation when the home PC is responding very slowly to the information requests from the net and the network gateway is showing high levels of network activity even though all the e-mails, web browsers and other programs that access the net are closed.

The universal fact is that the Internet is the vast network of untrusted and potentially malicious machine. The above stated situation can occur when an untrusted user is using the internet. This will be the reason behind the network gateway showing the high levels of network activity as the untrusted user is sharing the bandwidth. As the person is using all the bandwidth of the network, this will automatically slow down the speed of network accessibility of the original/trusted user.

There are many reasons behind a malware gaining access to the system. When the minimum security standards are not maintained, it is very much easy to hack a network or the system. Also when the passwords are not maintained for the internet network it will be open for anyone to use the network which intern slowdowns the accessibility of main user.

Some basic steps to check whether the malware has happened are to mainly check the speed of the network.

There are many ways one can follow to restore the PC to its safe operation. Some of them are as follows:

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse S
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.