by Artemis

Created on: October 02, 2007

A person will keep on getting ill for various reasons. Mainly due to personal hygiene, unhealthy environment, and conclusively: habits of no hygiene.

Computer users can be as unlucky without habits of computer hygiene.

Some habits will lead to easy infection:
1. Browsing to inappropriate sites (porn sites, gambling sites) without proper protection.
2. Not updating security patch as recommended.

3. Using weak browsers. A sample of weak browser is MS Internet Explorer 6. Consider moving to Mozilla Firefox, Opera or MS Internet Explorer 7 for better security.
4. Not installing anti-virus/anti-spyware applications.
5. Not updating anti-virus/anti-spyware definitions.
6. Downloading applications without anticipation of possible trojans or threats, like MyWebSearch etc.
7. Exchanging flashdisk with friends

Habits that prevent virus/spyware infection:
1. Install good anti-virus/anti-spyware applications, and update them regularly (usually weekly).
2. Install security update patch
3. Use a better and more secure browser: MSIE 7, Firefox 2, Opera 9, Apple Safari
4. If you use Windows XP, consider moving to Windows Vista. Windows XP has been around for 6 years, and many security holes have been revealed by virus creators. Windows Vista is much more secure.
5. Avoid inappropriate sites. They usually do nasty things to promote themselves, like setting itself as the browser's start page, connection that connects to them, promotion/pop-up messages in dialog boxes on screen, etc.

It's all about habits after all.

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