Virus and trojan woes - stacking the cards in your favour

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I had a call this afternoon from a lady in distress.

She told me how her PC had been behaving strangely the last couple of days with unfixable “virus found” messages and general slowness. She told me how her son’s PC, on the same network, had also exhibited some “anomolies” recently. She told me of her worry that important files might go missing and how much time she had lost.

Sadly, this is a familiar situation.

Let me give you a couple of things you can do in advance, to lessen the chances of this happening to you.

1.) Ensure that your PC is fully updated at all times

Why?

Computer programs are written by people. People are not perfect - they make mistakes. These mistakes, or bugs, in the programs, once they are known about, allow hackers to exploit them. For example, Internet Explorer has, over the course of time, had a number of bugs that allowed code to be run on your PC without your consent or knowledge, simply by visiting a carefully crafted rougue web site. This code could do anything it wanted to your computer - including installing a malicious program that did bad stuff.

In Windows XP, go to start > Control Panel > Security Center, click on the Automatic Updates link in the botton panel. A dialog box will appear with a single tab named Automatic Updates. Select the Automatic (recomended) radio button and select Every day and a time.

A couple of things to be aware of here. Firstly, you need to have administrator rights to do this. Secondly, when Windows finds any updates, they will be installed immediately in the background. It is sometimes neccessary to reboot when the installation has finished - Windows will keep nagging you to do this which can be very annoying. It’s best just to gracefully give in and allow Windows to reboot on the first request (remember to save your work first).

2.) Use an Anti Virus product

There are a number of choices here. We suggest AVG - because we’re resellers . If you’re a home user there is a free edition. This product, in our experience, runs nice and lightly on most systems.

Norton Antivirus, on the other hand can be a bit of a resource hog. However, if you want to give it a go you could do no better than get a 6 month complimentary subscription by downloading Google Pack from http://pack.google.com. Google Pack contains a whole bunch of free software - Norton is just one - more on this in a later post.

Whichever product you go for, ensure three things:-

The product is configured to update it’s virus definitions automatically as often as possible;
The product is configured to scan emails both as they come in and as they go out;
The product is configured to scan files automatically as they are opened - this is called Resident Shield in AVG.

3.) Run Spybot and Ad-Aware on a regular basis (ideally daily)

I’ve mentioned these two programs before in the previous post. There is one nice feature of Spybot that I’d like to mention. Fire up Spybot, on the left hand side, click on the Tools menu, then select Hosts File. Now click the button named Add Spybot-S&D hosts list at top left.

This does something quite clever. It installs a list of known bad web sites into your computer’s hosts file. The end result is that if you ever try, or accidentally try, or another bad website tries to redirect you to one of these bad web sites, it is blocked, thereby protecting you.

So there you have it. Do these things and you chances of virus and trojan woes will diminish.

See you on the Summit, Andy.