How To Prevent Viruses

Thought we would talk about viruses this month. All to often I hear from customers who do not have a hardware firewall installed. A hardware firewall can be your best friend at times, preventing viruses from getting into your computer. A good hardware firewall is a router. A router is placed between your computer and your internet connection provided by your internet service provider. A routers main purpose is to route traffic to and from your computer system, it can also act as a firewall preventing unwanted traffic to your network. If you own a computer you should have a hardware firewall installed. Companies such as Linksys, DLink, and Netgear make affordable routers for the home user.

If you are not running a network on your local computer or have no need for remote desktop protocol then I suggest turning on your windows firewall. Software firewalls are not as good as hardware firewalls but they will help prevent unwanted traffic such as viruses.

Email attachments are perhaps one of the largest exploits on the Internet today. Never open an email attachment if you don’t know who the sender of the email is. Even if you know the sender I would be leary of opening any attachments unless I was expecting it. Just because Billy Bob sent you an email it doesn’t mean he actually sent it. Maybe Billy Bob has a virus and your email address happened to be in Billy Bob’s address book. The virus sent out an email attachment to everyone in Billy Bob’s address book. Therefore be careful before opening any attachments.

The best thing you can do to prevent viruses is install a reliable virus program and keep it updated. You would be surprised how many people install the virus program and then forget about it. Virus programs need to be updated everyday because new viruses are created everyday. All virus applications keep information about the different viruses in the wild by using dat files. Dat files must be updated with new information about new viruses. Some good virus programs that are free include Microsoft Security Essentials and AVG Anti Virus. If you would rather purchase a virus program then I highly suggest ESET NOD32 Antivirus version 4.

Finally use common sense when using your computer system. If you insist on downloading music and software including movies stop using P2P programs like limewire and BearShare. When you finally get the file downloaded to your computer make sure to scan the file before using it.