You are surfing on the internet and suddenly a mysterious advert appears on your screen. You just visited a new website for the first time and then navigated to a new web page. Yet the advert has a close box and reappears every few seconds, after you click the close box.

You have just encountered malware. You have been lucky in this instance, as you have only an annoying advert. It may have been different, you may have received much worse malware while surfing the Internet.

There is an effective removal for this particular instance of malware, simply clear your Internet cache. This type of malware was a cookie, and you may have received the same advert appearing every time you opened your internet browser each time until your cache is emptied.

There are more effective means of protecting your self whilst surfing the Internet.

Get a firewall for one, if you already have one, double check it’s settings so you have protection on both inward and outward bound traffic, at the right settings, those annoying adverts will not be able to stay on your computer.

Every time you close your Internet browser, set it to clear the cache. Each time you visit a website a cookie is left in your cache, so the next time you visit the same website only new information is updated on the web page. Clearing your cache will also help to get rid of unwanted potential malware cookies.

Don’t visit untrustworthy websites, even most search engines now work in tandem with commercial anti-virus software that will display safe and verified websites on each search site.

Be very careful with using torrent downloads, that Britney Spears mp3 may actually turn out to be a trojan file in disguise, and torrent downloading will usually bypass anti-virus software and potentially your firewall.

Set your anti-virus and anti-malware software to automatically download new protection pattern files at least weekly.

Taking these steps will help in providing preventative protection measures whilst surfing the Internet.