News alert: It’s not 1998 anymore! If you haven’t updated your virus protection software in ten years, now would be a pretty good time to consider doing just that (and then perform an immediate scan).
It sounds silly, but there are some techies who actually neglect virus checking as a source of pride, “I know how to not get viruses in the first place!” Now maybe that attitude worked when we were all using AOL dialup and you had to download and install a questionable document entitled NotAVirus.vir in order to get infected, but the virus has evolved.
Today, one of the most popular approaches for virus makers is to use cross-site scripting. As in, you know those sites like MySpace, where you can embed media like a youtube video from one site into another? That allows users a great way to share music and videos, and it allows computer criminals a great way to share all sorts of viruses, adware, and malware. On many of these sites, the virus maker doesn’t even need an account, they can simply load a virus up onto the comments page, and anyone who visits the page without protection is going to get infected.
So, sorry to say, but the anti-virus protection you bought back in 2005 just isn’t going to do it anymore. In fact, today’s viruses were designed specifically to work around that protection you picked up years ago. The only reason virus makers keep coming up with new infection methods is because virus fighters already figured out how to block the old infection methods.
So if you’ve let your antivirus duties fall a bit behind, our advice is to shop around for a good protection package that includes real time scanning, something with a good, powerful database of known viruses, and… something that doesn’t cost too much.
In the meantime, you may want to hurry up and patch up your security holes with a free antivirus program for the time being. Avira and AVG Free are both pretty good as far as free antivirus programs go, Avira even gets daily updates to the virus database.
But whatever you do, don’t just ignore it. If you haven’t updated your software in awhile, we can almost guarantee that you have one or two viruses lurking about on your system. You know, they say that 33% of adult humans have been infected with HPV at one point or another, well, 100% of computers have been infected with a virus at one point or another. Make sure to keep your computer safe and clean, and your antivirus software up to date.
If you want to find out all the latest news on tech why not subscribe to our RSS feed?
Leave a Reply