Stopping Viruses What can I do to not catch a virus? Well, if attachments are the root of all computer evil, then be careful which attachments you open. Ask yourself these questions. Do I know the person who sent this message? If I know the person, is there something odd about the message? If a message is questionable, check with the person before you open the attachment. Does the message ask me to forward the attachment? If it does, don't do it until you find out what's in it. Can the attachment be run as a program? Look for the following extensions: .EXE, .VBS, .JS, and .BAT. Remember, viruses are small programs. Run the attachment by your virus software if you have it, otherwise I wouldn't open it if I were you. What do Anti-Virus Program do? We already know that viruses are programs. So we know it has a program code that makes it do whatever it does. This is referred to as virus definitions. What anti-virus programs do, is it looks for these virus definition. When it finds one, the alarms go off and it stops the program from running. Often a warning window will pop up on your computer. Then all you have to do is delete the program-and poof! Your virus is gone! So what if you had a virus before you run your anti-virus program? Well, you're in luck. Most of the modern anti-virus programs will scan your computer and remove existing viruses from your software. Where do I get Anti-Virus Programs? But online of course! Here are three common sites: Norton Anti-Virus 2000 McAfee VirusScan Trend Micro PC-cillin These sites also have some great resources where you can learn a lot more about viruses!