How can I protect myself?

If you receive an unknown or unexpected attachment, don’t open it no matter who it came from. Not only are some viruses capable of emailing themselves to everyone they find in an infected user’s address book, but inexperienced computer users are just as guilty of passing along payloads as hackers are of distributing them.

BitTorrent sites and other peer-to-peer file sharing are also common modes of spreading infection. When attempting to download a legitimate program, use the link provided at the company’s website. Pirated software is a particularly popular source of malware. Download firefox (available on our free stuff page above), and use it instead of internet Explorer, there are many internet virus's that specifically target Internet Explorer. For MP3 music downloads, we recommend using iTunes.

And finally, get in the habit of regularly checking for software updates. New exploits are always being discovered in Windows, QuickTime, web browsers, and other common programs. A good software for managing this is patchmypc, this can be downloaded at www.patchmypc.com and is entirely free.