Practice Safe Computing to Avoid Virus Attack

Prevention is always better than cure. While surfing the internet to protect the computer from virus attacks some preventive steps to be followed.

The best protection against a virus attack is to avoid opening unexpected email attachments and downloads from unreliable sources. Resist the urge to double-click everything in your mailbox. If you get an unexpected file attachment, send an enquiry email to its sender. Ask him about the nature and function of the file attachment.

For added safety, you need to install reliable antivirus scanning software and download its updates regularly. Major antivirus software venders, including Symantec, network associates, computer associates and trend micro, provide regular updates. Some venders also offers a service that will automatically retrieve updates on you computer from the company’s website.

Regular updates are essential. Researchers at computer economics estimate that 30 percent of small businesses are vulnerable to viruses because either they don’t keep their virus scanning software updated or they don’t install it correctly.

How anti virus software works

Scanning software installed in your system looks for a virus in two ways whether the virus is a known one or unknown. If it’s a known virus (one that has already been detected in the wild and has an antidote written for it), the software will look for the viruses signature – unique string of bytes that identifies the virus like fingerprint- and will remove it from your system. Most scanning software will catch not only a initial virus but also many of its variants as well, because the signature code usually remains intact.

In the case of new viruses for which no antidote has been created, the virus scanning software employs heuristics that look for unusual virus like activity on your system. If the program sees any suspected activity, it quarantines the questionable program and broadcasts a warning to you about what the program may be trying to do. Quarantine means keeping the virus in some isolated place on you computer under strict vigilance so that it could not do further harm to your computer. If you and the software think the program may be virus, you can send the quarantined file to the antivirus vendor, whereby researchers examine it, determine its signature, name and catalog it and release its antidote. It’s now a known virus. If the virus never appears again - which often happens when the virus are too poorly written to spread - then vendors categorize the virus as dormant. But viruses are like earthquakes: beacase initial out break is usually followed by aftershocks. Variants make up the bulk of known viruses.

You can easily purchase n anti virus software from the market or download a free version of some antivirus software from its company’s website. But it is recommended that you purchase a genuine copy of antivirus software as it comes with future support for your computer like updating the software against new virus threats and various additional features.