Beating Viruses the Smart Way

Email. Love it or loathe it email is now synonymous with doing business and most people would feel hopelessly lost without it.

Unfortunately we all know the downside of email as aside from irritating and sometimes offensive spam messages it can act as a conduit for malware.

The term malware encompasses a host of rotten software designed to undermine your system at best or steal personal and financial data at worst.

It’s quite a broad term that covers a variety of malicious code.

1. Viruses are probably the best known form of malware. A virus is a self replicating piece of code that can spread from one computer to another but in fact there are different types of viruses that can infect a machine;

2. Worms take advantage of security flaws in software such as Internet browsers or spreadsheets. They are self replicating and will search for machines that have the appropriate security flaw before replicating.

3. Email viruses come in different varieties and will use an email address book to send infected messages to other machines, often fooling a user into opening a message as it seems to have originated from a friend or colleague.

4. Trojans are not really a virus in the accepted term of the word as they cannot replicate automatically. Instead a Trojan is carried inside another file or piece of software.