by Gerhard Adam

Created on: June 03, 2008

While I can appreciate the sentiment when someone has to deal with the frustrations associated with a system that has been compromised, the reality is that many supposed "hackers" aren't necessarily within any jurisdictional boundary that would help. Even if I agreed with the sentiment of putting virus authors in jail, the question would be; how?

Whether you like it or not, the responsibility ultimately lies with the user to minimize the likelihood of exposure to malicious software, and therein lays the problem.

The difficulty is that too many people have acquired technology that they are ill-prepared to use and have virtually no knowledge of how it works. While some may accuse me of blaming the victim, there is ample reason to do so. You wouldn't think of buying a car and then complaining that you had to know how to steer it to avoid hitting objects, so it is with computers.

Clearly a computer that is simply placed in the home is not likely to experience problems, so the difficulty occurs when people venture outside their homes into the cyber-world of the internet. Just as the real world, once you leave the safe confines of your home, there is no guarantee as to what you may encounter or the impact it may have on you.

Therefore, it is important that people understand some of the basics in computing and take appropriate precautions.

In order to acquire a virus, one must download a program that is capable of running instructions on your machine which, depending on its sophistication, can then perform any number of functions according to its design. Therefore your first order of defense is to minimize what may be downloaded without your knowledge.

NEVER open an e-mail attachment that isn't from a completely trustworthy source and if there's any question whatsoever, confirm what was sent to you with the originating party.

Be wary of popular websites or file sharing software since many of these locations will distribute spyware or adware. You should also ensure that you have a good spyware/adware detection program to help root out some of the problems.

Many problems on systems are not viruses at all, but rather a large number of spyware/adware programs that are consuming all the background resources. This usually results in a system running extremely slow, or experiencing errors as these various pieces of software all compete for control.

Use a personal firewall or exploit one that is present in your router.

Do NOT become complacent simply because you installed some virus

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