Anyone who does a lot of downloading, or accesses diskettes from the outside world on a regular basis should develop an antivirus strategy. The most important weapon in your antivirus arsenal is a clean, write-protected bootable system diskette. Booting from a clean write-protected diskette is the only way to start up your system without any viruses in memory. No virus scanner/cleaner of any quality will run if there is a virus in memory because more programs can be infected by the virus as the scanner opens the files to check them. This diskette should also contain a record of your hard disk's master boot record, partition table, and your computer's CMOS data. Most antivirus packages contain utilities that can store this information for you. Lastly, this diskette should contain your favorite scanning/cleaning software because a virus may have infected this program on your hard drive. Running it from a clean diskette will ensure that you're not spreading the virus further.

I personally use three antivirus packages concurrently. The first is viruscan from Mcafee Associates. I use it mainly because when my company started to become virus-conscious we wanted to get a comprehensive package to guard against them. Everybody we knew seemed to use Mcafee so that's what we bought. I must tell you that after seeing what some other products can do I am not that impressed with Mcafee anymore. One reason is that Mcafee tends to mis-diagnose some viruses. This is a problem because if your computer is infected with virus A, but Mcafee thinks it's virus B, it will attempt to disinfect a virus that's not there, which can badly mess things up on your system. I will say that if you are a casual computer user, Mcafee is probably all you'll ever need because it is easy to use and it does a good job disinfecting most common viruses. I still use Mcafee just because it's there, but I never take its word as gospel.

Kaspersky Lab confirmed Tuesday that a potentially serious flaw exists in its antivirus software, but said a fix is on the way.

Software and services company CA has accused F-Secure of hyping security threats to smartphones after the Finnish antivirus specialist launched a mobile security service last week.

Got Antivirus? If you have a computer, the answer is probably yes. Viruses are growing exponentially, so the manufacturers have to be on their toes if they want to keep systems protected. It used to be as simple as analyzing your email and hard drive to look for viruses - not anymore!Lets take a look under the hood of your AV solution.

Computer security company Sophos believes that schoolchildren could represent a growing threat to other computer users because of lack of awareness about the dangers posed by computer viruses.

To combat the threat of "blended" virus attacks -- such as MSBlast -- security company F-Secure on Wednesday launched a combined firewall and anti-virus product. The F-Secure Anti Virus Client Security package is designed to combat the new breed of Internet threats, which combine the characteristics of a virus, worm or Trojan horse with a system vulnerability to propagate and launch attacks.

All in all it was a good year for SMB IT Security. It seems the problems keep coming and get more complicated, but a major theme seems to be materializing...greed. There was a time when most viruses and security issues were Pride related. Hackers from around the globe seeing what they can get away with or do. Now it seems greed and ripping people off is the top priority by a long shot. There is an upside to this

The CITES guide online recommends that "antivirus" be considered one word, but that "anti-spam" and "anti-spyware" be hyphenated. Princeton university says the same thing. There is a special case, notably symantec who refers to their product as AntiVirus. This is considered stylistically correct when ever referencing their product.

F-Secure launched antivirus software for Linux on Thursday that is designed to protect open-source Samba file servers and Linux by automatically detecting and removing viruses from files stored on the server.