You asked me why your antivirus wasn’t working in catching that virus. There are usually a number of reasons but the first line of defense is often a mis-configured Antivirus program. Most computers, whether they are new or not so new, have an Antivirus program already installed. Unfortunately, the problem stems from the user not knowing ‘how’ to set the Antivirus program to check for viruses. Right out of the box the Antivirus program is set for general use by the masses. One of the things I don’t understand is why the publishers of these programs think that scanning your computer once a week is sufficient. Do you only use your computer once a week? I know I don’t…mine is on almost constantly.

 So, what should you do? You MUST be proactive. Please understand that the Antivirus programs are only good once they know what the virus is and not before hand. So if a new virus comes out today, chances are really good that none of the Antivirus publishers knows about them until they know about it. Sometimes they find out by users who tell them what the symptoms are on their computers. Sometimes, an outbreak is so fast and furious the publishers know before you do and they get to work on removing the virus immediately.

What can you do? Make sure your Antivirus program does a definition download at least once a day, not once a week. For most small businesses and home users their program should check at least once every two hours. I don’t know any virus creators personally, but I’m willing to bet they don’t all agree to wait until a particular day to write a virus and publish it.

Leave your computer on at night (you can turn the monitor off though to save energy) and run a full, deep scan to ensure you didn’t pick something up during the day. In most cases the full scan can be scheduled so you don’t have to wait until 1 AM to run the scan manually.

Even though I’m suggesting you leave your computer on at night I do NOT suggest that you leave all your programs running or your Internet Browser open. Close up all the programs, save the data and since you’ve got the Internet Browser closed as well you can be pretty certain that there won’t be anything new coming in until you connect to the Internet again, or receive that next piece of e-mail.