More and more frequently, visiting the wrong website causes damage to peoples PCs. Even worse, some websites can cause serious damage to people’s lives by stealing their identity, destroying their credit score or emptying their bank account. Luckily, there are website authentication tools that can give you the information you need to protect yourself against sites that intend to spam, scam or annoy you with excessive pop-ups.

Security patches are necessary to fix unforeseen compatibility and functionality issues as well as security loopholes. These arise from flaws in the software that are exploited by cyber criminals in order to hijack or damage systems. Loopholes can be particularly dangerous if they allow an attacker to gain control of a system and execute commands, access data and pose as the operator of the system.

Melissa is a virus that exploits the macro feature within the Microsoft Office suite in order to infect documents and mass mail copies of itself to a victims address book. Unlike viruses that are packaged as stand-alone executable files, Melissa uses a feature that allows Office documents to activate other Microsoft applications and use their abilities.