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There are things you can do to help protect yourself from malware that is not reliant on software.

Common sense will go along way in protecting yourself.

But there's more to common sense than not opening an email attachment from an unknown person or email address.

What about your friends who email you every week and sometimes include picture or zip file attachments? Do you just open the attachment, or do you scan it first? If you just open it, then you could easily be infected by a mass mailing worm. Do you scan it?

Saving and scanning email attachments before opening them is a great habit to get into, but sometimes the virus is new, or the program is a custom Trojan, and the scanner passes it.

What happens then is your anti-virus scanner fails to see the attachment as a virus, Trojan or keylogger. You open it, and you infect yourself with a keylogger named something like wedding.scr, for example.

Why would you not open wedding.scr if one of your friends recently had wedding? So you click it and no screen saver. Instead infection.

So how do you protect yourself against such things?

The answer is very simple: You set up a rule for your friends and family on sending attachments.

You will not open any email attachment unless one of the following happens first:

1. They send you a separate email without an attachment stating that they just sent you a file and giving you the file's name. No email and you don't open that file no matter how legitimate it sounds.

2. Same as above but a phone call.

Even with this precaution in place, you should still save and scan attached files before opening them.


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by Nanaki See Profile edited by JMGullett See Profile
last modified: 2007-05-29 12:29:24