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Since personal computers became household items and the whole world joined the web of interconnectivity known as the Internet, computer viruses have been a bane to legitimate users, commercial and domestic alike. Anyone who has had even the most limited contact with computers is well aware of this infamous genre of computer software, and the weapon used to combat it: anti-virus applications.

Anti-virus software isolates and protects you from viruses it knows about, saving your computer from their harmful effects. This means that for it to be of use to you, it must be regularly and consistently updated. It is best to arrange for your anti-virus software to do this automatically. Each time you power on your computer or bring your system up, it connects with its supplier site and downloads the latest updates to the virus database. The better the virus update service provided by your anti-virus application supplier, the better you will be protected.

However, these suppliers are playing catch-up. It is impossible for them to provide you with protection from new viruses that have not yet come to their attention. This is where you, the user, must come in; developing the computer usage practices that will best protect your computer from new viruses.

Most people already realize that they should not open email attachments from people they don't know. What many fail to realize is that you should not open attachments from people you do know, until you first get confirmation from them that they did indeed send them. One of the main methods of proliferation viruses use is to email themselves to all the contacts on the address list of a computer they have infected. You are actually more likely to receive a virus in an email from someone you know, than from a stranger.

The other main source of viruses are the webpages you visit. Large companies can generally be expected to be safe, as they utilise top end anti-virus software and employ network security specialists to make their webpages as secure as possible. The likelihood that malicious hackers can insert a virus that will download from their pages when you access them is minimal. The potential threat increases for smaller businesses, because they have less financial resources available to provide security, although those that transact most of their business via the Internet are likely to be nearly as secure as the larger companies. Ad hoc webpages reached through a search engine are the least secure; read the details given about the contents by the search engine results to make your decision; is the content of the website really worth the risk of going there?

Learn more about this author, Perry McCarney.
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