Computer Virus

The Following Tips Will Help The User To Minimize Virus Risk:

If the users are truly worried about traditional (as opposed to e-mail) viruses, they should be running a more secure operating system like UNIX. One should never hear about viruses on these operating systems because the security features keep viruses (and unwanted human visitors) away from the hard disk.
If the users are using an unsecured operating system, then buying virus protection software is a nice safeguard. Some popular anti virus programs include:
•McAfee Virus Scan
•Norton Anti Virus
•Virex
•PC—cillin
•Avast!
•AVG Anti Virus System
Automatic protection of anti-virus software should be turned on at all times. 
The users should perform a manual scan (or schedule a scan to occur automatically) of their hard disks weekly. These scans supplement automatic protection and confirm that the computer is virus-free. 
Scan all floppy disks before first use. 
Disable floppy disk booting -- most computers now allow the user to do this, and that will eliminate the risk of a boot sector virus coming in from a floppy disk accidentally left in the drive. 
The users should Enable Automatic Update option of their anti-virus software in order to update their virus definition files.
Creation and maintenance of a rescue disk should be done by the user in order to facilitate recovery from certain boot viruses. 
Periodic backups of the hard disk should be done. 
Users’ should buy legal copies of all software they use and make write-protected backups. 
 Email messages and email attachments from unknown people should not be opened. Attachments that come in as Word files (.DOC), spreadsheets (.XLS), images (.GIF and .JPG), etc., are data files and they can do no damage (noting the macro virus problem in Word and Excel documents mentioned above). A file with an extension like EXE, COM or VBS is an executable, and an executable can do any sort of damage it wants. Further it should be verified that the "author" of the email has sent the attachments. Newer viruses can send email messages that appear to be from a person user know.
The potential users should make sure that Macro Virus Protection is enabled in all Microsoft applications, and they should never run macros in a document unless they know specifically the functionality of the macros.
Appropriate Passwords should be assigned to the shared network drives. 

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