Page 38 - IT Essentials And Data Recovery For Online Businesses

even boot up. Ad-Aware is simple to use and is available free at

https://www.adaware.com/

Before installing and activating any third-party firewall and virus protection, you’ll
want to be sure to de-activate the Windows security system, as having more than
one firewall running at the same time can cause major conflicts that can harm your

system. Simply go to your control panels, select the Windows Firewall icon, and

follow the instructions for de-activating the application.

E-mail Issues

Simply having a firewall and virus protection does not mean you can simply relax

and depend on it to do everything. Granted, these protections will do about 98% of
the work for you, but you’ll still need to do a bit of monitoring – especially when it
comes to e-mail. Many malicious programs arrive as e-mail attachments, and many

businesses simply no longer accept attachments from unfamiliar addresses. The

safest course of action: if you receive an e-mail from an unrecognized address and
it has any sort of attachment – delete it.

The other problem frequently encountered by individuals as well as businesses is

unsolicited commercial e-mail, popularly known as “spam.” Most e-mail programs
have a “bulk mail” folder to which you can direct all e-mails from specified
addresses and domains. Often however, you are limited to a certain number of

these. Alternatively, some e-mail programs allow you to direct all e-mail to the

“bulk mail” folder except that from addresses and domains you specify.

The best cure for spam is really prevention. If your business has a website (and it

should), avoid putting your e-mail address on the site as a link or hyper-text. The

reason is that small programs, sometimes known as webcrawlers or bots, are
constantly monitoring the Web and harvesting e-mail addresses from html code.