There are at least 60,000 known viruses and more are written every day. About 95-98% of viruses come through e-mail and instant messaging. Often viruses arrive with e-mail disguised as something entertaining, like pictures, music, or greeting cards. Virus writers are working around the clock to attack you; the antivirus vendors are working around the clock to help protect you.

Help protect your computer files and e-mail by using and updating your antivirus software. To help reduce the risk of a virus exploiting a vulnerability in your Microsoft software, make sure you have the latest patches and updates for your Microsoft® applications and Microsoft Windows® operating system.

How Can You Get a Virus?

Besides picking up a virus from an e-mail attachment, you can acquire a virus, trojan horse or worm from free content you download from a Web site or on a diskette someone shares with you. If your computer is not protected, once you download and install the program, the virus can spread. Viruses can spread around the world in less than 24 hours. But even after a virus is no longer in the news, it may still be active and can continue to harm computers that are not protected.

2. Install a Firewall

Despite red-alert headlines about hackers, trojan horses, worms and viruses, and despite the threat of identity theft and misappropriation of personal data, many home computer users have yet to invest in the first line of defense against external attacks: a firewall.

Currently, only about 55 percent of antivirus customers have a firewall installed," James Schmidt, product manager for the (MPF) product at, told the E-Commerce Times. This figure is troubling, considering that it takes into account only people who already have purchased antivirus software. In other words, these are the people who are concerned about Internet security. Statistics among the larger population of all Internet users likely are far more dismal.

Good fences make good neighbors. You can add an important layer of protection between your computer and the Internet by using a firewall system. Potential intruders scan computers on the Internet probing for a "port" where they can break and enter. A firewall can help block unauthorized entry into your computer, as well as restrict outbound traffic.

How does a firewall help protect your computer?

Firewalls help safeguard your computer by enforcing restrictions on incoming traffic. Firewalls can also help mask your computer's identity, so hackers' attempts to probe or scan your computer cannot return the type of information that makes it easy to invade.

Why Would Someone Hack Your Computer?

Besides gaining access to your private information, such as financial records or password files, intruders can, and do, use individuals' computers to:

1. Launch denial of service (DoS) attacks against a high profile Web site. Once gaining control, the hacker can direct your computer, and hundreds or thousands of other so-called "zombies," to act simultaneously, which overloads and effectively shuts down a popular site.

2. Distribute software illegally. After appropriating space on your hard drive, they enable others to access your computer as a "warez" site and download pirated entertainment or business applications.

3. Install Anti-Spyware Software

Your every action online could be recorded without your explicit permission ! The least we can do is bring this to your attention, so you have the choice and are well aware before giving away personal information.

The issue begins with marketing, companies trying to collect consumer information, demographics, or in some cases personally identifiable information about users. It's accomplished through their software installing Spyware, or Trojans on your computer, usually without your knowledge or consent, and then forwarding the collected personal information to their data collection facilities... The gathered information is then potentially being sold and combined with other databases to build up profiles of individual web users, usually for direct marketing purposes.

It might sound like sci-fi to the uninitiated, but it is real, and it is happening every day online. Your privacy is being invaded. For anti-spyware software solutions, you might want to look up: StopZilla, Spysweeper and CounterSpy are examples of good programs to fight spyware etc... Many such anti-spyware programs block advertisements on websites as side-effect of protecting your privacy.

Anti-virus products focus on viruses; Spyware fighting programs. focus on every other sort of computer pest, including ANSI bombs, answering machine hacks, carding, denial of service attack tools, disassemblers, virus droppers, hacking guides, hostile Java, icq, key loggers, mail bombers, password crackers, remote monitoring, network scanning, sniffers, spoofers, spyware, surveillance, Trojans, Trojan creation tools, virus creation tools, virus writing tools, and word lists used by password crackers.

4. Back Up Your Data

The Need for a Backup Strategy

by Kevin J. Vella

Uniblue Systems

So you’ve decided to backup your data but what is the next step? You must have a backup strategy irrespective of whether you are a home user or a business user. The depth of the strategy is the only variant between these two types of users.

As time goes by people and businesses are facing massive and ever-increasing amounts of data that are difficult to manage and that remain unprotected. In this light, the need for a backup strategy becomes critical. Let me just take email as an example: the 12/2004 issue of Smart Computing reports that 88% of adult PC users send and receive emails. The International Data Corporation reports that 16.8 trillion emails were transmitted in 2004 with this figure climbing to 19.7 trillion this year. According to Smart Computing, American businesses send about 9 billion emails a day. On average, home-users transmit around 435kb in email attachments every day. One other research firm estimates that typical corporations with 5000 employees accumulate 4 terabytes of emails every year. The size of my Outlook PST file for 2004 at work rested at 1.4Gb; at home it was 650Mb! And finally, Dataquest estimates that the total number of hard disk drives shipped in 2002 rests at 212.5m units representing around 8.5m terabytes of storage space.

Home-user data includes documents, audio and video files, scanned images, and digital photos. Businesses have marketing collateral developed and stored electronically, customer information stacked in databases, financial records posted in accounting packages, budgets and business plans recorded on network storage devices. As this list grows, the need for a backup strategy becomes even more obvious!

We usually advise customers to look at 5 key elements of any backup strategy:

1. Invest in good Backup Software: Read the reviews, visit the websites and look out for features and assurances that the product you are buying is reliable, fast and easy to use. Spend time reading the websites of the various suppliers. Some products cost no more than $40 but your data costs much more. Losing your data because the software you have bought is not effective means that you have thrown away an extra $40!

2. Plan Your Backups: Most software packages on the market have schedulers. Use these schedulers. It doesn’t take much time to set up a timetable for backups. Depending on how many times you use your PC you can schedule your periodical backups: at work, I backup every day at 9 a.m.. At home, I backup once a week.

3. Check the Integrity of your Restore: Even though you have backed up, what guarantee do you have that your data can be restored when disaster hits? The best way to ensure full “restorability” of your data is to buy a backup product that has bit-level verification (like WinBackup 2.0). Such a feature makes sure that while the product is performing your backup it checks all the data down to the level of bits and bytes. In essence, the software first backs up the data and then automatically performs a test restore to make sure that every single bit has been copied.

4. Check the Integrity of your Backup Medium: You can have the best software in the world and back your data every hour, however, if you do not have a good medium to store your archives, you are doomed. The second best way to ensure the restorability of your data is to choose good mediums and to do regular test restores from them.

5. Check your hard drives regularly and make sure you have good anti-spyware and anti-virus software. There is no harm in checking hard drives for errors and bad sectors as these drives do fail over time.

Winbackup is a great tool to back up your data on your windows system.

Windows System Maintenance Tips