Use an anti-virus program
Viruses have become an unavoidable part of our computer life. To fight this danger prepared, you will have to use an anti-virus program. But this is not enough in itself. 5-10 viruses appear daily worldwide. You can only protect yourself against them by using the most up to date version of your program and virus database.


Increasing protection
You can increase the effectiveness of your anti-virus system by applying the following security rules, which decrease the possibility of a virus infection greatly.

1. You can practically avoid boot virus infections by changing the boot sequence in our CMOS settings so as not to boot from a floppy disk primarily. This increases the speed of booting too, and if you need to boot from a floppy disk, you can change the settings back in a second.


2. Before putting your floppy disks in an alien computer, make them write-protected. If you have to write on them, check them with an ant-virus program before using them on your machine.


3. Avoid the exchange of Word documents and Excel worksheets. A great proportion of macro viruses are stored in the files storing these documents. Their spreading is realized through the exchange of these files. If you have to send a document electronically, use a file type instead of DOC, through which macro viruses cannot spread. So Word files are recommended to be sent in RTF extension instead of DOC and Excel files in CSV extension. If the exchange of text information is needed only, use the TXT extension.


4. When using Office 97 and Office 2000, switch macro virus protection on. This will warn you if you want to open a document, which contains macros. In case of Office 2000, set the level of protection to the highest so that only those macros would be run, which come from a reliable source.


5. Do not open any of the e-mail attachments without scanning. Save the attachment first and only open it if the virus scanning finds it clean. No matter how harmless the attachment seems and how much known the sender is, do not trust it.


6. Infections by script viruses can be avoided by switching off Windows Scripting Host. This script running component is the organic part of later Windows systems (Windows 98/2000/ME), it is installed with them, and it is installed with Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher on earlier systems.


7. Set the security level in Internet Explorer at least to average, this denies the running of dangerous scripts or ActiveX components.

Other useful hints
Although they don't serve anti-virus protection directly, some other hints can be useful too.

1. Hoaxes in e-mail spread almost as frequently as viruses. Users with good intentions, generating mail traffic like an e-mail worm, send these. One or two persons should be assigned in every organization to provide the source of real virus alerts. They should know something about viruses so as to be able to decide whether a virus alert is real or it is only a hoax. If someone receives information inside an organization on a real or imaginary virus, he should only forward it to these persons to decide whether everyone should be alerted or not. So every virus alert should be sent only to these experts and only those should be taken serious, which have come from them.


2. Make backups of our valuable data on our computer regularly. A part of viruses is data destroying on purpose while another part of them causes the destruction of data due to a programming mistake or an unknown side effect. In these cases backups can be rather useful as only an insignificant part of our work will be lost, which has been crated since the last saving.


3. Ban Windows to hide known file attributes. A part of e-mail worms exploit this service, which provides disinformation by spreading in multiple attribute files. For example Loveletter uses .TXT.VBS extension, from which the system hides the known VBS extension so that the worm program would seem to be a simple TXT file.