Virus Protection Tips

from Slaven's Corner, PocoReport Newsletter

Viruses have become a major problem for both users and Internet service providers. Many of today's viruses do not have destructive payloads, which means they will not cause serious damage, though there are definite exceptions. The main damage done today by viruses is to the Internet infrastructure - when certain virus infections reach their peak they swamp servers with infected copies of the virus. This slows down the affected servers, and in the case of email viruses fills up email storage so that legitimate email is returned, and in extreme cases can knock off corporate email systems off line as they buckle under the increased email volume. All this can cause world wide email delivery to often fail, resulting in missing messages without "undeliverable mail" notices you would normally get. These problems can also delay your email by several days, to be delivered much later than you expected.

For these reasons, keeping your computer clean of viruses should always be on your mind. If you haven't already, make sure to install anti-virus software, and more importantly to update the virus definitions for that software at least once per week (some AV software can do this automatically). There are free AV alternatives you can try, for desktop software AVG is a good choice:

http://www.grisoft.com

If you're on the go or do not have the rights to install AV software on your computer you may prefer a web-based AV scanner that needs no installing - Trend Micro's HouseCall is a good one to try:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

So how do you get infected by a virus? Well, there are several ways to contract a virus, but the most common ones these days are network viruses and email viruses. A network virus exploits bugs in Windows to connect to remote computers on the network and infect them. If you are using a DSL or a cable high-speed connection you should protect yourself by installing a hardware or a software firewall, as your computer is constantly connected to the network and is an easy target. A hardware firewall is more preferable, but if you need to go the software route then Windows XP has a firewall built-in (bring up Properties for your network connection), while ZoneAlarm works well for other versions of Windows:

http://www.zonelabs.com

Also, make sure to visit Microsoft's Windows Update web site available from Internet Explorer Tools menu. Windows Update will patch up any known holes your computer may still have. Remember to re-visit this site frequently as new security problems are discovered every month.

This finally leads us to email viruses, which are our main concern. These are by far the majority of viruses today, yet they are also one of the easiest to stop from propagating. As I mentioned last month, if you are using PocoMail then half the battle is almost done - unlike a lot of other email clients like Outlook Express, PocoMail will thwart a lot of common exploits email viruses use to automatically infect your computer by simply reading the infected email. To put it in other terms: you cannot get infected by simply reading a message with PocoMail, like you could with Outlook Express and some other email clients. You may have heard that before, but we get asked this question a lot!

But email viruses desperately want to infect your computer, so they often try some "social engineering". This means they will use all kinds of methods to tempt you into opening the attached file. If you try to open the attachment PocoMail will warn you if you really want to proceed, but if you say Yes you may end up with an infected computer. Such ploys make the email appear to come from a legitimate source, like your administrator or even Microsoft - a recent virus used a very official looking email that urged you to apply the attached Windows patch to protect yourself against viruses, except that patch was the virus! If you think you wouldn't be fooled by such attempts, think again as virus writers are getting really creative (keep in mind this is an image of the infected email):

http://www.pocomail.com/images/scr-worm.gif

So unless you actually expect to receive an attached file, always confirm with the sender if they actually meant to send you that email before opening the attachment.

I hope these few tips help you cope with the recent outbreaks.

Slaven Radic, CPO (Chief Poco Officer)

PocoMail President

Information on PocoMail: http://www.pocomail.com/index.html

Information on the PocoMail Newsletter: http://www.pocomail.com/report.html