Must-follow Tips to Immune your machine from Viruses

Last updated on February 21, 2016

Must-follow tips to protect your machine from viruses:

Viruses are very harmful executables which can replicate and copy themselves to other programs, software applications, data files and various sectors of your hard disk causing loss of confidential data. They can also slow down your system performance, cause erratic behavior and lead to various crashes. Viruses can spread through clicking attachments links in e-mail or sharing files, photos and music through social media, downloading free games and software etc. In order to protect your machine from viruses, you should follow the simple tips listed below,

Installing the best Antivirus Software:

An antivirus is a software application which continuously monitors your system and frequently scans your hard disk for presence of any harmful virus signatures. There are plenty of free antivirus applications available online which you can download and install in your machine. But free antivirus applications might not contain the latest virus signatures and you won’t get frequent updates, which means there is no guaranteed protection. In order to ensure complete protection from viruses, you should install the best antivirus and keep updating it regularly with latest virus signatures. The best antivirus programs offer safety against all types of threats including spyware, malware, adware, Trojan horses, worms etc. You should schedule frequent scans to monitor your machine and ensure everything is in order.

Installing a Firewall Application to protect your network:

Firewall is another useful utility which can monitor all incoming traffic to your network and block malicious users from entering your system. Some of the modern firewall can offload resource intensive applications like content filtering, spyware and virus scans without compromising on your network performance. Also you can get real-time updates to ensure protection from all kinds of cyber-threats. You can configure your firewall using various policies to block/allow traffic from specific sources according to your requirement.

Installing IPS and IDS to monitor your network traffic:

Similar to firewalls, Intrusion Prevention systems (IPS) can also monitor your network traffic and prevent malicious traffic from entering your network. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) acts like a visibility tool just monitoring the traffic while IPS uses certain traffic policies to filter unwanted traffic from reaching your network. Also they can help in encrypting all the data transmitted from your network to internet using secure sockets layer (SSL) and other protocols, which prevents snooping and unauthorized access of your data. Together they can ensure better security with faster performance.

Update your Operating system and Software Applications to the latest versions:

Another important step you should take in order to ensure immunity of your system from viruses is continuously updating your operating system and other software applications. Windows comes with an auto-update feature which you should always keep enabled in order to get the latest security updates. Similarly you should update yrlank antivirus software with the latest virus signatures. Viruses and malware try to exploit the security vulnerabilities in your system and if your operating system is outdated, you can be prone to attacks from viruses due to possible security holes in your system.

Be careful with social-media and e-mail attachments:

You should be aware that sharing photos, videos and documents through social media can result in spreading of viruses without your knowledge. You might click on malicious links shared by friends in your social network which could contain harmful viruses that can get copied to your machine. Also E-mail attachments can contain viruses and malware which can spread to your machine when you open those links. One popular example is MyDoom virus which spread through e-mails and caused more than 38.5 billion dollars’ worth of financial loss. So you should never open e-mail attachments from unknown sources and always do thorough scan of e-mails for viruses using powerful antivirus software.