© Andrew Bettany and Mike Halsey 2017

Andrew Bettany and Mike Halsey, Windows Virus and Malware Troubleshooting , 10.1007/978-1-4842-2607-0_1

1. What Is Malware?

Andrew Bettany and Mike Halsey2

(1)Microsoft, York, North Yorkshire, UK

(2)Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK

Few things can happen to a PC that are worse than it becoming infected with malware. As a consequence, your PC might fail to start, you may lose your connection to the Internet, or a hardware component in the PC might fail, but all of this pales into insignificance when compared to the threat of infection.

Why is this? While troubleshooting problems on PCs commonly leads us to discover that the problem is isolated to just the machine in question, malware infection immediately threatens ...

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