The Best Antivirus - Common Sense v1.0
Antivirses are notorious for slowing your machine down and generally playing havoc to your operating system. It's sometimes seen as a case of the medicine being worse than the illness. Either way, we all know where most viruses come from, we all know how you get them and it shouldn't be the surprise some people claim it to be. Most viruses come from one of the following causes:
Piracy
Downloading illegal material carries with it the risk of obtaining malware, spyware and viruses. Because you're obtaining material through less legitimate methods, it's expected that you're eventually going to download something with a virus. There have been some serious virus attacks caused because of piracy: I believe most common applications would be the insertion of a Trojan (but there are many different types of viruses and Piracy will open you up to most of them).
Pornography
Yes, one of the reasons for the internet to still be around is one of the key offenders for sneaking viruses onto your computer. Don't believe me? Google for some porn, spend an hour browsing from site to site and then see how marvelous your computer is then. Just browsing for some nude-pictures is more than likely to just throw malware after malware at your browser, but it's possible viruses are sent in your direction too.
StupidityYes, stupidity plays the biggest part. Opening attachments to emails from people you don't know, accepting ominous files across MSN, downloading files from "dodgy" websites... All of this dramatically increases your chance of receiving something undesireable on your beloved machine. While some stupidity can be classed as being "uneducated" (you wouldn't call your 65 year old mum/gran as being stupid because she was naive enough to open something on her email would you?), it still accounts for the majority of the viruses.
Unavoidable, massive virus attacks
These are the viruses that my antivirus does not defend against: the massive attacks such as MS-Blaster. The ones that are literally viral and infect machines that have not been patched specifically to prevent them.
The Best Antivirus - Common Sense v1.0
Therefore, I implement Common Sense as my antivirus. You can even peruse pornography or piracy (if you so wished) provided you implement *some* level of common sense. The basic rules for running common sense are:
- If you MUST pirate, use respected releases
- Update your operating system on a regular basis (especially Windows users)
- Avoid looking for porn if you can, if you can't, maybe you need to get out a bit more. Or pirate some ;-)
- Don't open unexpected attachments from people you don't know
- Don't run .exe files you're sent over messenger
- Make sure your router has a decent hardware firewall and you're behind the DMZ
- Avoid looking for cracks/serials on the internet
- Don't ever touch Kazaa. Ever.
Malware?
It's useful to keep software like SpyBot Search and Destroy, Adaware etc installed so that you can give your machine a clean-out every now and then. Even the best of us occasionally get spyware and it's important that you have the applications ready to fix any problems should they arise.
With this in mind, there's no reason why (if you're a legal law abiding user - yes, some exist) you *need* to run an antivirus.
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