Protection

Precautionary measures can be taken through:

  • Activity Monitoring Programs: They try to prevent infection before it happens.
  • Scanners: They are the most convenient and widely used anti-virus programs. But they are not totally reliable as many viruses can bypass them.
  • Integrity Checkers or Modification Detectors: They are not virus specific and so can detect new viruses without being constantly updated. E.g. ASP Integrity Toolkit (commercial), and Integrity Master and VDS (shareware)

Other anti-virus techniques are:

  • Create a special MBR to make the hard disk inaccessible when booting from a diskette
  • Encryption of files with decryption before execution
  • Use of the 3 Diskette fences. One prevents executables from being accessed from floppy drives while another prohibits the use of unscanned files or diskettes. And the third uses a non-standard diskette format so diskettes can only be used on machines using the appropriate anti-virus software. E.g. D-Fence, Virus Fence, TbFence, DiskNet

One should also consider the following things:

  • Make sure you have a clean boot disk, test with the latest antivirus software.
  • Use reputable, up-to-date and properly installed anti-virus software regularly.
  • Always run a memory-resident scanner to monitor disk access and executable files before they're run.
  • Check all new systems and all floppy disks when they're brought in with a good virus-scanning program.
  • Scan pre-formatted diskettes before use.
  • Make sure your data is backed up regularly.

Ideally one should have a combination of the above mentioned techniques.

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