According to Antivirus firm, F-Secure, Microsoft has failed to remove a long recognised security risk from Windows 7.

According to F-Secure’s Chief research officer, Windows operating systems (NT, 2000, XP, Vista and now Windows 7) contains a “hide extensions” feature which could be exploited by virus writers to trick users into opening and running malicious files.

What this virus does is turn documents and folders into executables. For example- you have ‘image.jpg’ file, the virus hides image.jpg and creates exact copy ‘image.jpg.exe’. The .exe is hidden so you won’t notice the difference, even the icons are same. You click to open the file and virus starts acting.

The best way to protect yourself from this attack is to scan your PC and keep User Account Control (UAC) on. Yes! UAC although annoying is helpful. It happened to me – one of my pendrive had this virus. I clicked to open a word file and UAC was asking me if I really want to open the file. I was annoyed, UAC shouldn’t ask my confirmation for opening a document. Them I realised that the document was an .exe file. I clicked no in UAC and scanned my pendrive to find 2 dozen virus. Stay safe and switch on that annoying UAC.