Your complete guide to getting yourself infected with malware

Following on from our complete guide to giving crooks access to your Facebook account, we have now compiled some of the best advice out there to getting yourself infected with malware.

If you want cyber crooks to stalk your online activities, collect your passwords and sensitive financial information, hold hostage all your personal files or harness your computer for any number of nefarious activities, then you should follow these five steps. They’ll get malware on your computer in no time.

5. Always give permission

If something is asking for your permission to run and/or download, make sure you always say yes. Your Internet browser and security software won’t let files automatically download to your computer and run., so most of the time it’s you that needs to allow the download to begin.

So you need to say yes to make sure that malware can get onto your computer as quickly as possible. It you’re on a website you don’t trust or landed on after blindly clicking links on social media, that’s even better, because there’s a higher chance that will be malware!

4. Don’t update your software

Criminals are always looking for security exploits in the software you’re using, so they can install malware on your computer with greater ease. Ensuring you never install updates will allow criminals to exploit those vulnerabilities. You might not even have to go through the trouble of granting permission for the malware to install since it may happen automatically.

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3. Assume all email attachments are safe

Whether or not you know the sender, just automatically assume all email attachments are okay to open and run, especially if they are in a ZIP file or have BAT, JS or EXE extensions.

2. Install free software without researching it

No matter where you found a piece of software, just install it. Whether it was from a peer-to-peer file sharing service or from a website you’ve never heard of. Install it and don’t research whether the software is dangerous or whether it will try to install dangerous components onto your device.

1. Don’t use security software

Security software has the ability to detect and remove malware, so make sure you don’t have any installed (or disable any included security software) to make sure malware stays on your computer. Also never perform any system scans which could uncover malware on your computer.