Computer Virus Protection

Computer virus protection is 99% prevention. There is no anti-virus program available online today that can protect your home computers 100% from infection.

The only way to reach anywhere near total security protection for your home PCs do is to use extreme caution when working online, whether you are surfing the internet or reading your e-mail.

Rules for good computer virus protection include:

Never, and this means never, open an attachment or an e-mail from a source that you don’t know, delete it. Chances are the sender was up to no good. Now you might ask, “But, what if the e-mail turns out to be an important one?” That is easy, you either retreive it from you deleted items folder or ask the sender to resend it.

Sometimes a malicious piece of software, a virus, can be disguised under a name that may sound familiar, friendly, or funny, tempting you to open it.  Do not fall for this trick.  Delete the file or e-mail immediately.

Viruses can sometimes come from people you know.  Good computer virus protection means knowing who is supposed to be sending you attachments and when to expect them.  Don’t open an attachment that you did not expect to receive.

A computer virus will have one of three different file extensions:.exe, .vbs. and .shs.  These are all programming language extensions.  Computer viruses will most often have a .vbs extension.

Common sense will be the most effective computer virus protection you can get. If you are careless and allow a virus to get through to your computer, any of several actions might happen:

• Data may become completely unrecoverable.
• Irreparable damage may be done to your computer system.
• Hours of productivity may be lost to downtime.

Remember that anti-virus programs cannot create repairs or blocks for viruses until they actually have a copy of the virus to work on. This means that somebody, somewhere will have to suffer the wrath of the virus before the rest of us will get protection from it in the form of anti-virus updates for our software.

So, no matter how good the antivirus software you have installed on your computer, or how good your firewall is, hackers will find a way to invade your computer, resulting in a loss of time, data, and, worst case scenario, a loss of personal information.

The only way to protect your computer from viruses; spyware, phishing attacks and hackers is to use a tried and tested antivirus scanner and a multi-layered security approach in tandem with basic computer virus protection safety rules.