(+) An Ounce of Virus and Malware Prevention is Worth a Lot

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

Today's warning about a new scam circulating online claiming to be invitations from LinkedIn brought to mind how easy it is to deal with such problems. Of course, you always want to have the latest updates installed on your anti-virus and anti-malware program, but that alone is not enough.

NOTE: "Malware" is an abbreviation for "malevolent software" and is used as a general reference to viruses, trojan horse programs, spyware, and other software that is designed to do bad things to your computer.

The anti-virus and anti-malware programs can only detect new problems AFTER each program's producers have updated the program's virus definitions to detect whatever latest malware is floating around. Typically, that is one to seven days AFTER the new virus or malware is released. Yesterday's problem spread around the world within minutes and most anti-virus/anti-malware programs did not yet detect it when the email message was received.

Since most of these various scams only infect Windows systems, the best defense is to switch to a different operating system. However, most people are not prepared to do that.

A second solution for Windows users is to have another system available for use when you need it. Luckily, that is easy to do and is available free of charge. In fact, you don't really need a second computer.

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