Remember Your Virus Protection

How serious is a virus to your system and to others it may infect? So serious that it could wipe out your email service and worse: your hard drive. Today, viruses and worms come to us through Internet web pages, downloaded zip files and through email.  If you do not have scanning virus protection software running to remove these “creatures” from your computer, you risk destroying valuable information and services to yourself and others.

What is the best virus protection software to buy? There are a number of good choices but Norton Anti-Virus and McAfee Virus Scan stand out as probably the best for ease of use and installation. Prices range between  $35-$40 for basic programs. Each service provides free updates for a period of time and then you are asked to update your subscription for a small fee. These programs are not perfect. Some viruses will go undetected, while some products do not actually kill a particular virus but quarantines it.

Some basic things that I have learned the hard way: First, depending on the age of your virus program and operating system, if you leave your machine on all the time and do not reboot occasionally, your virus protection software updating system may not update itself.  This will leave you vulnerable to new viruses not previously known to your virus protection software. Second, virus updates could show up on your screen while you are working on something important. Do not make the mistake of canceling out of updates. You will most certainly forget to go back to update and then you risk infecting yourself with the latest and greatest virus or worm of the week.

One of the things we have been wrestling with is putting virus protection software on the network and passing out protection and updates through our main system. Right now we have installed individual virus protection on all our agents machines and updated subscriptions manually.  Network virus protection software is not cheap… it runs over $1,000 and it is not perfect. Our agents run on different platforms from Windows 98, Windows XP to Mac OsX, and we have found compatibility issues with the network virus protection software and cannot support everyone equally. By taking the responsibility to update each machine in the office, we are at least controlling that every agent’s machine has active virus protection software and is being updated regularly.