How can I protect myself from viruses and such?

This FAQ answer was written by Theora: The most common viruses are boot sector infectors. You can help protect yourself against those by write protecting all disks which you do not need write access to. Definitely keep a set of write protected floppy system disks. If you get a virus, it will make things much simpler. And, they are good for coasters. Only kidding. Scan all incoming files with a recent copy of a good virus scanner. Among the best are F-Prot, Dr. Solomon's Anti-virus Toolkit, and Thunderbyte Anti-Virus. AVP is also a good proggie. Using more than one scanner could
be helpful. You may get those one or two viruses that the other guy happened to miss this month. New viruses come out at the rate of about 8 per day now. NO scanner can keep up with them all, but the four mentioned here do the best job of keeping current. Any _good_ scanner will detect the majority of common viruses. No virus scanner will detect all viruses.

Right now there are about 5600 known viruses. New ones are written all the time. If you use a scanner for virus detection, you need to make sure you get frequent updates. If you rely on behaviour blockers, you should know that such programs can be bypassed easily by a technique known as tunnelling. You may want to use integrity checkers as well as scanners. Keep in mind that while these can supply added protection, they are not foolproof.

You may want to use a particular kind of scanner, called resident scanners.

Those are programs which stay resident in the computer memory and

constantly monitor program execution (and sometimes even access to the

files containing programs). If you try to execute a program, the resident

scanner receives control and scans it first for known viruses. Only if no

such viruses are found, the program is allowed to execute.

Most virus scanners will not protect you against many kinds of trojans, any

sort of logic bombs, or worms. Theoretically, they _could_ protect you

against logic bombs and/or worms, by addition of scanning strings; however,

this is rarely done.

The best, actually only way, to protect yourself is to know what you have

on your system and make sure what you have there is authorised by you. Make

freqent backups of all important files. Keep your DOS system files write

protected. Write protect all disks that you do not need to write to. If you

do get a virus, don't panic. Call the support department of the company who

supplies your anti-virus product if you aren't sure of what you are doing.

If the company you got your anti-virus software from does not have a good

technical support department, change companies.

The best way to make sure viruses are not spread is not to spread them.

Some people do this intentionally. We discourage this. Viruses aren't cool.

Where can I get more information about viruses?

Assembly lanaguage programming books illustrate the (boring) aspect of

replication and have for a long time. The most exciting/interesting thing

about viruses is all the controversy around them. Free speech, legality,

and cute payloads are a lot more interesting than "find first, find next"

calls. You can get information about the technical aspects of viruses, as

well as help if you should happen to get a virus, from the virus-l FAQ,

posted on comp. virus every so often. You can also pick up on the various

debates there. There are alt.virus type newsgroups, but the level of

technical expertise is minimal, and so far at least there has not been a

lot of real "help" for people who want to get -rid- of a virus.

There are a lot of virus experts. To become one, just call yourself one.

Only Kidding. Understanding viruses involves understanding programming,

operating systems, and their interaction. Understanding all of the 'Cult of

Virus' business requires a lot of discernment. There are a number of good

papers available on viruses, and the Cult of Virus; you can get information

on them from just about anyone listed in the virus-l FAQ. The FTP site

ftp.informatik.uni-hamburg.de is a pretty reliable site for proggies and

text.