24. How can I protect myself from viruses and such?This FAQ answer was written by Theora:The most common viruses are boot sector infectors. You can help protectyourself against those by write protecting all disks which you do not needwrite access to. Definitely keep a set of write protected floppy systemdisks. If you get a virus, it will make things much simpler. And, they aregood for coasters. Only kidding.Scan all incoming files with a recent copy of a good virus scanner. Amongthe best are F-Prot, Dr. Solomon's Anti-virus Toolkit, and ThunderbyteAnti-Virus. AVP is also a good proggie. Using more than one scanner couldbe helpful. You may get those one or two viruses that the other guyhappened to miss this month.New viruses come out at the rate of about 8 per day now. NO scanner cankeep up with them all, but the four mentioned here do the best job ofkeeping current. Any _good_ scanner will detect the majority of commonviruses. No virus scanner will detect all viruses.Right now there are about 5600 known viruses. New ones are written all thetime. If you use a scanner for virus detection, you need to make sure youget frequent updates. If you rely on behaviour blockers, you should knowthat such programs can be bypassed easily by a technique known astunnelling.You may want to use integrity checkers as well as scanners. Keep in mindthat while these can supply added protection, they are not foolproof.You may want to use a particular kind of scanner, called resident scanners.Those are programs which stay resident in the computer memory andconstantly monitor program execution (and sometimes even access to thefiles containing programs). If you try to execute a program, the residentscanner receives control and scans it first for known viruses. Only if nosuch viruses are found, the program is allowed to execute.Most virus scanners will not protect you against many kinds of trojans, anysort of logic bombs, or worms. Theoretically, they _could_ protect youagainst logic bombs and/or worms, by addition of scanning strings; however,this is rarely done.The best, actually only way, to protect yourself is to know what you haveon your system and make sure what you have there is authorised by you. Makefreqent backups of all important files. Keep your DOS system files writeprotected. Write protect all disks that you do not need to write to. If youdo get a virus, don't panic. Call the support department of the company whosupplies your anti-virus product if you aren't sure of what you are doing.If the company you got your anti-virus software from does not have a goodtechnical support department, change companies.The best way to make sure viruses are not spread is not to spread them.Some people do this intentionally. We discourage this. Viruses aren't cool.25. Where can I get more information about viruses?This FAQ answer was written by Theora:Assembly lanaguage programming books illustrate the (boring) aspect ofreplication and have for a long time. The most exciting/interesting thingabout viruses is all the controversy around them. Free speech, legality,and cute payloads are a lot more interesting than "find first, find next"calls. You can get information about the technical aspects of viruses, aswell as help if you should happen to get a virus, from the virus-l FAQ,posted on comp. virus every so often. You can also pick up on the variousdebates there. There are alt.virus type newsgroups, but the level oftechnical expertise is minimal, and so far at least there has not been alot of real "help" for people who want to get -rid- of a virus.There are a lot of virus experts. To become one, just call yourself one.Only Kidding. Understanding viruses involves understanding programming,operating systems, and their interaction. Understanding all of the 'Cult ofVirus' business requires a lot of discernment. There are a number of goodpapers available on viruses, and the Cult of Virus; you can get informationon them from just about anyone listed in the virus-l FAQ. The FTP siteftp.informatik.uni-hamburg.de is a pretty reliable site for proggies andtext.</XMP>