Next,
employ a good, passive spam filter (see ???Stop Spam??? in Chapter 7), and
ask your ISP to filter out viruses on the server side.
Where do these email attachments come from, you may ask?
As part of their objective to duplicate and distribute themselves,
many viruses hijack your email program and use it to
send infected files to everyone in your address book. In
nearly all cases, these viruses are designed to work with the
email software most people have on their systems, namely
Microsoft Outlook and Windows Mail (formerly Outlook
Express). If you want to significantly hobble your computer??™s
susceptibility to this type of attack, you??™d be wise to
use any other email software, such as Mozilla Thunderbird
(http://www.mozilla.com) or stick with web-based email like
Gmail (http://www.gmail.com) or Windows Live Mail (http://
mail.live.com).
Infected files
Viruses don??™t just invade your computer and wreak havoc, they replicate
themselves and bury copies of themselves in other files. This means
that once your computer has been infected, the virus is likely sitting dormant
in any of the applications and even personal documents stored on
your hard disk. This not only means that you may be spreading the
virus each time you email documents to others, but that others may be
unwittingly sharing viruses with you.
One of the most common types of viruses involves macros, small scripts
(programming code) embedded in documents.
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