What do you do to protect your computer from being infected by a virus, worm or spyware attack?

Other people already suggested software utilities that you could download and install to help protect you. Instead I will list common sense tips that sometimes get overlooked:

1. Do not install software that you do not trust or did not intend to install in the first place.

Example: A while ago I downloaded and installed DIVX player software. During the installation process it prompted to install Gator. Gator was notorious as spyware.

2. Make sure you update your firewall, antivirus, and other software applications you use on your computer. Keeping up to date with the software available will make it harder for someone to compromise your system. This goes double for system updates such as Windows Update

3. Do not install P2P file sharing software at all. The power that P2P file sharing software gives is also it's biggest flaw. P2P software gives you the power to download music/movies from someone else's computer at the cost of letting people download music/movies off of your computer. Now who's to say that someone cannot alter a movie, let's call it "Spiderman 3 Full Movie", and mask that file so that it installs a keystroke recorder if you try to play the movie. Now let's take it further and say that the person that created this file also programmed it to automatically upload any passwords to his computer via the P2P file sharing software. You wouldn't even know that your passwords were being logged and uploaded off your computer everytime you started the P2P software.

4. Immediately delete email from people that you do not know.

Example: From time to time I receive email that looks like it comes from Bank of America telling me to login to online banking and check my status. I don't even have an online banking account with Bank of America.

5. If you must download and install software make sure it is from a reputable website.

6. Do not go to websites that you are unsure of or never heard of.

Example: http://www.google.com/ is ok to go to but I would avoid going to gogggggle.com, googgel.com, and googledot.com

7. Do not go click on those banners promising you a free Nintendo if you can kill the spiders.

8. Do not be afraid to virus scan your files once a week or even once a day. Most antivirus softwares allow you to set up your computer to be scanned automatically at anytime of the day. Pick a time that you know no one will be using the computer, such as 4am in the morning, then till it to scan your computer at that time.

9. Always back up your work in case something happens.

I Use McAfee Virus Protection And Firewall. As Far As Spyware And Adware Are Concerned. The Best Is Counter Spy. Also Each Day I Use A Program Called Cleanup, Then Do Your Cookies. Then Go To Start, From There, Accessories, Down To System Tools. From There, Disk Cleanup Then Disk Defragmenter. I Hope This Helps You. If You Need Any Further Help Or Programs, Don't Hesitate To Get In Touch With Me......Tip: I Used Norton At One Time. When I Had A Problem, They Kept Me On Hold For Hours (No Joke), Also Norton Is Outsourced(As Many Of Our Good Jobs In The USA Are Today) I Couldn't Understand One Word They Said. There Dialect Is Unbelievable. Don't Waste Your Precious Time Or Money On Norton. I Have McAfee For Free From Comcast. It Works Perfectly. If You Need A Norton Removal Tool(Because It's Almost Impossible To Remove It All) Let Me Know..Good Luck, Gidget

At work because it is a company of 5000 people so we have to use AV software and we use Trend. The biggest pain I have ever had has been the AV software. I administrate about 30 servers and every couple of weeks they send out an update that causes a false positive on all my machines. (updates come out every day some times more then once a day) Most of the time the false positives are nothing more then a pain as in say OK for them to delete things that aren't being used or some text file (yes it can think a text file is a virus), but sometime it deletes files that are needed, last week taking down a web server until I found the problem and restored the files (No real virus, false positive). Most of my servers run builds, and in several cases if we don't turn off the AV software during a build it will turn a 1 1/2 hour build into a 5 hour build. Also at times it interferes with our source control system (yes these are text files they are interfering with!). So when we do some of the bigger merges of code again we turn off the AV software.

So has AV software actually helped? Well about 5 years ago we had idiots in the company opening "I luv you" attachments and similar, and they were spread, but then again the IT department spent a long time fixing those so I'm not sure how much the AV software really helped. IT changed to a policy of scanning email, and that does help.

I notice that people seem to think that if you have X AV software and then load in Y AV software and it "finds" stuff they think Y AV software is better then X AV software, because they have no idea that they could have done this backwards and got the same results, but no difference in real results. Vacuum sales men have been doing this trick for years.

At home, me and my wife never run any kind of AV software. I have very good backup procedures just in case (for this and other more important reasons) and I have never had a virus on my machines. We simply don't download some "free" software from places we can't trust, and our email is scanned by our ISP.

I put in a different hard drive, and instantly, without downloading programs or using the computer for very long, the same virus came. It was leaking through ad banners while using Internet Explorer. This peaked my interest, and for the whole month of January this year, I watched and tested every setting I could imagine. I also downloaded various firewall, anti-virus, and adware/spyware programs. Comodo seems to be a good choice, if you want a free and reliable firewall. The router will act as a physical firewall between your computer and the Internet. This will pretty much protect you from Internet worms and the router isn't dependent on software upgrades. Be careful when you click on a link to "opt out" of spam e-mail messages. More often than not this is simply a ploy to get you to visit a rogue site that takes advantage of some flaw in Internet Explorer so a Trojan can be loaded into your computer and cause lots of problems. Make sure your anti-virus software is on automatic update. Most anti-virus companies provide updates between every 3-7 days because of the new threats that are discovered every day. You could also make the switch to a Macintosh computer, which aren't affected by most viruses that on the loose out there. Use a different Internet browser like Mozilla's Fire Fox, which is a lot more secure than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Also, if your Internet service provider will allow it switch also to Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client. Some viruses are mass mailing and take advantage of security flaws in Outlook. Hope that helps.

The biggest pain I have ever had has been the AV software. I administrate about 30 servers and every couple of weeks they send out an update that causes a false positive on all my machines. (updates come out every day some times more then once a day) Most of the time the false positives are nothing more then a pain as in say OK for them to delete things that aren't being used or some text file (yes it can think a text file is a virus), but sometime it deletes files that are needed, last week taking down a web server until I found the problem and restored the files (No real virus, false positive). Most of my servers run builds, and in several cases if we don't turn off the AV software during a build it will turn a 1 1/2 hour build into a 5 hour build. Also at times it interferes with our source control system (yes these are text files they are interfering with!). So when we do some of the bigger merges of code again we turn off the AV software.

Internet threats and risks are prevalent in the online world. Viruses, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, hackers and other malicious code can cause minor annoyances to large-scale damage on computer users’ PCs or even their personal identity.

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The router will act as a physical firewall between your computer and the Internet. This will pretty much protect you from Internet worms and the router isn't dependent on software upgrades. Be careful when you click on a link to "opt out" of spam e-mail messages. More often than not this is simply a ploy to get you to visit a rogue site that takes advantage of some flaw in Internet Explorer so a Trojan can be loaded into your computer and cause lots of problems. Make sure your anti-virus software is on automatic update. Most anti-virus companies provide updates between every 3-7 days because of the new threats that are discovered every day. You could also make the switch to a Macintosh computer, which aren't affected by most viruses that on the loose out there. Use a different Internet browser like Mozilla's Fire Fox, which is a lot more secure than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Also, if your Internet service provider will allow it switch also to Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client. Some viruses are mass mailing and take advantage of security flaws in Outlook. Hope that helps.

The best defense is knowledge. Learn where viruses and spyware come from. The most nefarious come from downloaded software - be careful where you download from, make sure its from legitimate sites only.

Another is email - don't open attachments unless you are absolutely certain who they are from. This is sometimes a problem , because people often forward stuff and don't put their own text in the message - you don't know if its the real person sending the message or an auto-generating virus thingy. Here's the solution there - if someone forwards you a video or something and you're not sure, respond and ask, 'Bob, was this from you?'. Also do your friends a favor - and if you must forward a YouTube video or something to your friends, put some text in the message, like "Thought you guys would think this was funny! --Bob". That way they know you sent it personally.

Another place to get malware is directly from websites. Go into Tools / Internet options in your Internet Explorer and look at the Privacy tab and the Security tab. For security, Medium should be good enough, and Medium cookie settings in Privacy, though you might want to raise it to high - it will not seriously impact your web browsing, though the best thing for you to do would be to learn what these settings actually mean - buy a book or ask an IT guy.

This will pretty much protect you from Internet worms and the router isn't dependent on software upgrades. Be careful when you click on a link to "opt out" of spam e-mail messages. More often than not this is simply a ploy to get you to visit a rogue site that takes advantage of some flaw in Internet Explorer so a Trojan can be loaded into your computer and cause lots of problems. Make sure your anti-virus software is on automatic update. Most anti-virus companies provide updates between every 3-7 days because of the new threats that are discovered every day. You could also make the switch to a Macintosh computer, which aren't affected by most viruses that on the loose out there. Use a different Internet browser like Mozilla's Fire Fox, which is a lot more secure than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Also, if your Internet service provider will allow it switch also to Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client. Some viruses are mass mailing and take advantage of security flaws in Outlook. Hope that helps.

The funny thing is that people complain about Norton being bloated and slowing down systems, Kaspersky is the very same way. Unless you have a very new system with high memory content and processing power, these programs will eat resources like a rat at the aftermath of a carnival. Kaspersky finds just about every virus that has ever entered my atmosphere, and I have seen some pretty nasty ones. The only pain about that program was that it's resource hog behavior and it's questioning every single action got to be a real headache. Now I have Bitdefender, SpySweeper, Ad-aware SE, Spybot S&D, and CounterSpy. After re-formatting my harddrive and re-installing my O/S after getting infected at some particularly insidious sites, I installed these programs and intentionally went back to see what would happen. SpySweeper(which uses Sophos AV) catches it right away and won't even allow the page to be displayed. Of the five sites I knew would infect me, only one was able to get through. The free online scanner I use from Bitdefender is the one that killed it. I plan to completely install Bitdefender and keep SpySweeper as well, but without it's Sophos AV function. By the way, Sophos is a hog as well on slower systems. Wow, after reading this, I realize just how much computing technology has affected my life, good and bad.