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Viruses

© Bert Markgraf

People who tend to worry a lot probably shouldn't be running a small business. In addition to the work-related problems employees have to deal with and the owner-related problems all business owners face, small business owners have to face issues for which bigger businesses have whole departments of specialists. One such issue is computer viruses.

To get a few things straight first:

• you can't get viruses from e-mail;
• you can get viruses from e-mail attachments but only if you open them;
• you can't get viruses from data files like letters, graphics, spreadsheets etc.

There is one qualification to the last point. Viruses are programs - pure data files can't have viruses. But if a data file has a certain programming capability, such as the macro language in MS Word, then a virus can be written as a macro and can be transmitted via such a file. The capabilities of the virus are then limited by the functions available in the macro language.

This means that you can limit the exposure of your system to viruses by restricting the use of non-approved programs on your system. Should you get a virus anyway, you can get help from a number of sites, including my favourite virus-scan program, McAfee. You can also try House Call, a free service which will check your computer for viruses on-line. If your data is properly backed up (sheesh, another worry), you at least don't need to be concerned about losing that.

People I talk with always express surprise that there are such things as viruses and programmers who produce them. I think it is surprising that there are not more. For an idea of what would be possible if we had more malicious programmers, have a look here.