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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week Wednesday, October 06,
2004 |
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The protection you need on the
internet today - Part 1 – or Don’t surf in shark
infested waters ... Most
people who buy a new computer today anywhere get some kind of a anti-virus program
with it, to protect them supposedly from all the dangers of the internet.
Most of these programs are what is known as nagware- you actually don’t
own them, and they’re usually only good for a few months, then they
stop working unless you actually buy them. At that point the majority of
people don’t buy them, but they do keep on surfing the internet and
using an outdated anti-virus program which actually doesn’t work
anymore. But the people think that because they have an anti-virus program on
their computer – they’re fully protected. If only
it was that simple, but of course this is the pc world, and it’s not.
You need much more than an anti-virus program today,
and I will talk about several major threats that are out there that you need
protection from. First of
all, you have to keep your anti-virus program updated daily, and most of them
will automatically update themselves once a day. And in order to do this, you
have to be a registered current owner of an antivirus program – which
means you have to buy one, and then you need to annually pay the fee to pay
for the daily updates they offer. But this leads to the question I
have long wondered about – if you update your antivirus program once a day, what happens to you later during that day
when dozens of new viruses are released on the internet. You see, I have
seen several companies infected with a new strain of computer virus, while
currently running a registered anti-virus program and while receiving the
daily updates. And it turns out that most of us have been lucky and we have
actually dodged bullets without knowing it. Recently
one of the major anti-virus companies, Panda software, stated that they and
the other anti-virus companies actually cannot guarantee current 24 hours
protection against all the new emerging viruses, because most of the major
vendors – Mcafee, Norton, Panda, Sophos and the others – have
used the traditional method of creating and distributing an updated
anti-virus “signature” file once a day. A direct
quote from the Pandasoftware.com website states: “Even though your
antivirus can protect you against viruses and malicious code, it cannot deal
adequately with the explosive
propagation of new threats. Highly dangerous viruses
such as Nestky, Mydoom or Sobig infect thousands of computers so quickly that
antivirus solutions simply can't be updated in time to deal with them.
“ Panda then goes on to explain the problem with the
traditional approach most vendors have used in dealing with computer viruses: “In order to detect
and eliminate new viruses, antivirus solutions usually take a reactive
approach: they wait for it to appear, infecting its first computers and then
they are updated to combat it as soon as possible. “ Next week on Raw Bytes
I’ll continue this story, and what anti-virus vendors are doing to fix
this problem. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2004 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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