More on e-mail viruses. If you're not interested, push del now

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

Statistics are showing that more viruses are spread via e-mail than other
means. Before e-mail it was BBSes. It isn't the text message you get and
read via e-mail, BBS, or WWW (www has some other problems), but it's the
PROGRAMS you receive (upload/download). If you never receive PROGRAMS via
e-mail, you will not have an e-mail propagated virus problem. What would
you download??? Perhaps program updates or a game from a friend. In my
work, I send programs to all of my colleagues and receive programs from
them. You have to know your friends and colleagues well and always use
something like Norton Virus to check something before installation. The WWW
is a distributed computer system. When you display a web page on your
monitor, many times a program, sent over the net, will execute on your
computer. These are GIF's, Java Applets, ActivX, etc. All of these had
problems in the beginning in that the code sent along with the web page
could indeed harm your system, providing the sender had those intentions.
These problems are, for the most part, cleaned-up now. When you see a
banner running across, or a dancing doohickey, (anything moving) on the web
page you just received, program code that was send with the page is
executing on your computer. As I said before, safeguards are now in place
to keep all but the very very very persistent from infecting your computer.
The solution is to back-up your system frequently.