As with preventing infections in the off-line world, being careful and paying attention to the risks that are present are the best way to prevent from becoming the latest victim of a computer virus. Doing so will be a favor to your friends and colleagues as well, since many infections are spread via E-Mail to people in your E-Mail program's Address Book.

Since virus infections can be delivered via different methods, it is important to be aware of those methods and protect yourself from each possible method of infection.

Install an Anti-Virus Program
The most basic step in protecting yourself against being infected by a virus is to install, run, and keep updated a good anti-virus program. This will help you find any infections on your system and will protect you from incoming infections in the form of infected E-Mail messages and infected programs that are installed on your computer.

Anti-Virus Software

• Symantec Norton Anti-Virus
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• McAfee VirusScan
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• Trend Micro Housecall
  

Protect Your E-Mail Inbox with CoreComm Defender
The most common way for virus infections to spread is via E-Mail. Once they infect a computer, some viruses will spread by sending copies of itself via E-Mail to addresses that it finds in address books and temporary files. Because of this, you can receive a virus from someone you know, and they may not know they sent it. To protect yourself from receiving virus-laden E-Mails, you can add our optional "CoreComm Defender" service to your account. This powerful service monitors your incoming E-Mail and kills E-Mail messages containing viruses before they reach your computer! For more details including pricing, please see our Account Options page.

Prevent Future Infections
An old adage says that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" and this advice can be applied easily to keeping safe from virus infections. Read the documentation for your E-Mail program and your web browser to see if there are settings which will prevent infections from the common viruses. You should make sure that "Macro Virus Protection" is enabled in all Microsoft applications, and you should never run macros in a document unless you know what they do. Most of all, don't ever double-click on an attachment in an E-Mail message that you are not absolutely sure is harmless!

If you are in a situation where multiple people have access to your computer, be aware of what software might be installed and/or executed on your computer by others. Make others aware of how virus infections can happen, and how they spread, and you will save yourself a lot of time and effort!