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Anti-Virus

Anti-virus software is probably the most important piece of software to have installed on any computer today. With virus creators putting out a new virus almost everyday and then making changes to their virus to stay one step ahead of the anti-virus companies, you need to use good judgment along with keeping your anti-virus software up to date.

Recommended Anti-Virus Software

There are 2 main anti-virus companies that are recommended for their products, Symantec Endpoint Protection® and McAfee VirusScan®.

VCOM does not necessarily recommend one over the other, but we do ask that you use at least one of them .If you purchase one of our recommended Dell Computers, Symantec Endpoint Protection will be made available to you free of charge, but if you prefer an alternative package that is certainly fine... just make sure you have one. (Also see the Spyware page for important protection).

 

Avoiding Viruses

At VCOM, we do have measures in place on the mail server to help with the influx of viruses, but it never hurts to be cautious when you receive an e-mail with an attachment. The best advice is - if you do not know the user, do not open the attachment. If you know the user, but were not expecting an attachment from them or if they have never sent you an attachment, then do not open the attachment. Virus creators are becoming more creative in tricking users into opening their infected attachments thus enabling their creation to continue to gain in popularity. The most popular trick is to write in the virus a script that allows it to mail itself out to everyone located in the user's address book. The virus attaches itself to the new outgoing message and makes it appear as if the user sent the message to that person on the address list. Since the recipient knows the sender they automatically open the attachment and then infect themselves and allows the vicious cycle to continue.

Virus Hoaxes

Another thing to remember is some viruses are hoaxes, a fake virus that does not exist but is reported as a real virus to excite people.

Below are some sites that have good information on hoaxes:

For further information, see more IT links on the navigation bar on the left of this page.