What Can You Do To Help Stop The Spread Of Viruses?
These days, most computer users realize they need to be using antivirus software. The trouble is, there is a lot of equipment providing services to these users on the internet. What is being done to protect them from virus infections?
Computer viruses attack servers – web, file, ftp and e-mail, along with routers and other network gear – along with individual PC’s.
Servers are usually substantially the same as PC’s only with more memory, disk space and processors. Web servers house web pages and programs for Internet users, e-mail servers store, send and receive e-mail, and file and ftp servers make possible storage and distribution of all manner of files for other systems. Routers are simply specialized computers, with proprietary operating systems, for routing network traffic.
Because of that fact, they’re often vulnerable to the same viruses and other internet security threats that the average desktop system is. They also need to run antivirus software, firewalls and other forms of protection.
What else can be done?
Since servers and routers provide services to multiple, sometimes thousands, of user systems they’re more frequently attacked. Users can help administrators of these systems by keeping their own systems clean and refraining from passing on viruses to others across them. Administrators can help themselves by forgoing the temptation to use them as personal computers with full e-mail clients, word processing software, and fully enabled browsers.
By keeping your computer protected by antivirus, firewall and other internet security software you help to minimize the target area for the attacks to hit. It can also help to keep your browser and operating system updated with the latest patches, and possibly even run an alternative browser such as Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.
Avoid booting from or loading software from CD’s, DVD’s or other disks that haven’t been scanned for viruses, if you’re not sure of the source. If a single file on one of those disks contains a virus, it can spread like wildfire.
FTP servers, used to store and provide sending and receiving of files over networks, should become a thing of the past. Vanilla ftp (File Transfer Protocol) can’t be secured since passwords are passed in clear text (unencrypted) over the network where they can be picked up by sniffers. Sniffers are software and/or hardware used to spy on networks. Secure FTP versions should be used instead.
It’s up to all of us to make sure these systems remain secure – not just the system administrators. They have a lot of work on their plate and aren’t always as quick to respond to security issues as they would like.
Filed under: Computers & Technology