You, Your Computer and Viruses
It never ceases to amaze me how little thought people give to the safety of the data on their computer. They’ll continue hoarding personal files and information on it with no thought given to data backups, anti-virus or firewall software. For months (or even years) they use their computer always assuming that viruses, spyware, hacks and hard drive crashes happen to other people - most of it is just hype to sell software and external hard drives right?
Wrong.
It’s always the same. The same people who assume “It can never happen to me” are the exact people who get caught with their drawers down. One recent example is of a friend I chatted with on MSN one night recently. A few minutes later her MSN sends me a link with a virus in it. Luckily enough my anti-virus software caught it. Sadly for her that virus had been sent to all her MSN contacts and everyone in her Outlook address book. She’d been using a free anti-virus package which simply hadn’t been protecting her PC properly - something is free for a reason; usually because it’s not very good.
She then said “I’d die if I lost all my college work on this laptop”. So I asked “So you’ve got all your files backed up right?”. Her reply? Go on guess what she replied? “No I don’t have them backed up”.
DOH!!
This is an intelligent young woman training to become a teacher. Her laptop was expensive and her school work is priceless (she could never have replaced it) yet she’ll use a free anti-virus tool and no backup system! Does that make sense to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.
She was lucky - the virus didn’t destroy any data so she won’t have to drop out of college. Luck was on her side this time and the fact that the following day she went and invested in Norton Antivirus on my recommendation. She also got herself signed up Mozy Online Backup and invested in a USB memory key to store her data on.
She had to spend some cash yes but now her lifes work is protected.
You’re either protecting your computer data or you’re not. Period.