How to Protect Against Viruses

Viruses

Viruses are computer programs which has these characteristics:

1. The program is able to self-replicate. 2. The program is able to activate itself. In addition, viruses spread by infecting files.

Some viruses are pretty harmless and more of a nuisance. E.g They flash a message and display the author?s birthday. However, there are those that damages your computer system, slowdown your Internet access or even steal your confidential data.

Real Life experiences

Back when I was administering multiple office networks across the region, I have seen some viruses such as ?Netsky? attacking the computer networks and they come in by the thousands (20,000 in a night to be precise !).

Fortunately, I had an anti-virus program that was blocking these virus onslaught from entering into the Computer Data Centre which holds the company critical operations and data storage. The unsung hero (The anti-virus) did it?s job well and not a single virus came through the company network. Unfortunately, the server that runs the anti-virus had a hardware failure due to the extremely high traffic of cleaning these viruses.

I had to immediately get ready a standby server to take over the anti-virus job and later installed a clustered anti-virus solution for high availability. This meant an anti-virus software is the absolutely the first protection that a computer cannot do without.

Preventive measure from Viruses

For a home or small office user, the first protection required is at least a decent anti-virus software to protect your computer especially when connected to the Internet. It is important to make sure the anti-virus is updated.

Some of the features that I find useful in an anti-virus are a user-friendly interface and should not take much of your computer resources. Others include:

* Easy to use protection ? install and forget * Check for good reviews from major IT/PC Magazines * 24/7 technical support provided * Smaller installation and automatically update pattern files

Worst case scenario......

What if there is a nasty virus in your computer and the anti-virus simply cannot clean it ? As a last resort, reinstall the Operating Systems which include formatting and recreating the partition. Ensure CDs used are free from viruses. Also important here is that you have backup your critical data. Checkout the section on Windows Security Hardening that covers backing up PC/Server.

Gabriel Ng is a professional IT Security Consultant, IT Auditor (CISSP) and author of http://www.comsectutorial.com This site is setup to provide information, recommendation on hacking prevention, controls to minimise security threats from viruses, trojans, spywares, hacking based real life experience while conducting security assessment and penetration tests.

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