Stop Email Viruses! Protect Yourself!

There has been a lot of material discussing viruses proliferating across the Internet. A great many of these viruses are transmitted through email attachments. There is only one sure way to stop your computer from getting infected with a virus: Don't open potentially harmful attachments. A normal e-mail message is ordinary text, but computer viruses are little programs in binary code. A computer virus cannot become active until the program containing it is run. Merely reading an e-mail message cannot activate a computer virus.
It's really that simple. If you don't open the attachment, it can't infect your system-but how can you tell the infected ones from non-infected ones? All you have to do is look at the attachment's filename before opening it. All files have some name to start with, followed by a dot and then the three letter extension. The three letter extension is what gives you the warning you need. It is the three letter file extension that illustrates what type of file format that file is.

These attachments can be programs, word-processing documents, or spreadsheet or other program-specific files, and they can include a computer virus. In this case the text portion of the e-mail is still not dangerous but the attachment is.

RULE: Don't ever run or use e-mail attachments from unknown sources.

A nifty program that a friend sends you because someone sent it to him or her should be considered a program from an unknown source. Accepting and running it may harm your computer and the information on it.

All .jpg and .gif files are images. Images rarely contain viruses. An .exe file on the other hand is a program. If you receive an email with an .exe attachment, you can almost be sure that it is a virus. The same applies to extensions like .vbs, .bat, .pif, and .com. Most viruses use your address book to distribute themselves so you are much more likely to get a virus from someone you know than from someone you don't. Good sound advice is to not open email attachments with file extensions that are suspect. Below is a list of potential threats, if the files arrive through your email.

Treat everything else with caution and you will be well protected. And buy and use a good antivirus program like McAfee, or Norton's or Pc-Cillin. If you can't afford to buy one, or just don't want to spend the money for whatever reason, there are some good free antivirus programs out there. Just put in a Google search for free Anti-Virus software and you will see.

Check out these free antivirus programs at www.filehippo.com - any of them are better than no antivirus and surprisingly, most of them do a better job than many programs that you buy. AVG Free is our favourite at Side Porch Computer Services - it is easy to install, does not use up a lot of computer resources and is easy to uninstall if required.

Free Online Virus Scans

You can also go to several websites and have your computer checked for free to see if you have a virus infection. Just put in a Google Search for Free Online Virus Scan and you will get tons of links including Trend Micro, McAfee, Symantec just to name a few. These are super free services to try out. Here are links to just a few of our favourites:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/

Want to learn more about computer viruses?

There are web pages devoted to computer viruses. A reliable one, maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy, is the Computer Incident Advisory Capability, or CIAC,. Visit it to learn about the history and variety of real and imaginary threats, chain letters, and other computer issues.

The following pages are also good sources for information about real and imaginary threats, about viruses and urban legends:

The Computer Virus Myths HomePage

Any questions or comments?

Just email us at: sideporch@rogers.com