Virus Protection

What is a Virus? A computer virus is a foregin computer program that infects a computer and causes damage or takes hold of resources for others to use. Viruses generally use exploits or play on human nature to infect computers.

How has my computer "caught" a virus? Previously, for a home user the way to catch a virus was to boot from an infected floppy disk, the virus would then copy it self to memory and infect any other floppy disks that were used. Recently though the major ways viruses have been infecting computers is by using an exploit in Outlook and Outlook express. An email with the virus attached would be sent by an infected computer and when the email was opened, or previewed in Outlook or Outlook Express, the virus would run itself, then send infected emails to everyone in the address book. The blaster virus that recently caused numerous problem was even more clever - it used a bug in Windows2000 or XP to run and install itself.

What can I do? The quickest solution is to install a virus checker and keep it up to date. As new viruses find their way onto the net with new methods of transfering themselves virus checkers need to be able to identify these to stop them. But keeping up to date with patches and updgrades to applications will help dramatically cut down on the way viruses can find their way onto a system.

Can anything else help? As mentioned earlier keeping patches for operating systems and applications up to date can help you from getting viruses, also installing a "firewall" can stop network viruses (like the recent blaster virus) from infecting your system by the back door.

Most manufacturers make trial versions of their software available, which will generally give you 3 months of virus update files. One manufacturer that makes a full verision available is Grisoft and the AVG Anti Virus version 6 for home or personel use.

Some other Anti Virus programs are F-Secure Anti Virus, H_Bedv Anti Virus Personal Edition, McAfee Virus Scan 7 Home Edition, Symantec Norton AntiVirus and Trend Micro PC-Cillin.