Virus protection
Computer viruses can severely damage and disrupt your work on a laptop.
Because you can use your laptop to a certain extent for personal use, you should take all necessary steps to protect it from viral attack.
Viruses can enter through:
- removable media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks and USB memory sticks
- emails
- the internet (including web browsers, FTP programs and chat rooms)
- file downloads
- network file shares, such as servers and shared folders.
Ways to avoid virus contamination
With virus contamination prevalent in today's digital age, it is important that you do everything to protect your laptop from viruses.
Computers viruses not only have the potential to severely damage your laptop, they can also disrupt your work.
To avoid virus contamination:
- do not open any files attached to suspicious or unknown emails
- exercise caution when downloading files from the internet - save files to your laptop first and run the virus scanner before opening them
- delete chain and junk emails - do not forward or reply to any
- never reply to spam - spam emails can contain viruses and consume a large amount of memory, which slows computer networks
- backup personal files to external media devices regularly - if a virus deletes files stored on your laptop and you have backed up your files you will be able to recover your files and continue working
- don't share files online - sharing files exposes your laptop to possible virus contamination
- before transferring files to your laptop, scan them - this includes files on portable disks, USB sticks, the department's IT network and the internet.
When downloading files from the internet or viewing email attachments, the risk of virus contamination is high.
If you perform a virus scan before opening a file, the risk of contamination is minimised.
