The Best Virus Protection

I was out with a friend, and geek that I am, the conversation turned to computers. Not surprisingly, he wanted advice. I get that a lot. He was having some trouble getting a bootleg copy of Norton's anti-virus software installed, and was fishing for alternatives. But rather than geting advice the usual way, by asking "what should I do?", he posed it differently, and briefly stumped me.

"What anti-virus software do you use?" he asked.

I drew a blank. I couldn't think of one. "I... I don't... I don't use any," I finally stammered.

He grinned, like someone who'd caught a proctologist who'd never had a colon exam, or a priest who doesn't actually go to confession himself. Which is how I felt...

Until I thought about it a beat longer and remembered why: I'd never felt a need for any. For one thing, I have a script that processes all my incoming mail on the server itself, and summarily dumps any that have attachments with potentially-executable file types, and hacks apart any HTML code in mail messages that might be used to load an executable file from a remote web site.

But the main reason I don't worry about viruses is that I'm pretty much immune. Not only don't I use Outlook to read e-mail (most e-mail-borne viruses take advantage of Outlook security holes of one kind or another), but I don't use Windows. I do most of my mail-reading on a Linux system, and my next-most-often used computer is a Mac. They're about as likely to get infected by a virus as my home stereo is. They're not 100% invulnerable, but unlike a Windows system, they were engineered not to be easy targets.

I do have a couple boxes that run Windows. One is my "legacy" system, which I boot maybe a couple times a week to run Win98 and some Windows-only software that I haven't fully weaned myself from (Paint Shop Pro, for example). The other is my "compatibility" system, which has more-or-less current Windows technology loaded on it (such as IE6 and a discarded Office XP licence) in case my other systems can't open a particular MS Word document, and to test any web sites I develop in the current MS browser. That machine rarely gets turned on. So they're pretty darn safe.

So what do I recommend for virus protection? Norton's is actually pretty good, and so's McAfee's. Anti-Vir is a nice free option for personal use. There are a bunch of other good tools out there. But what the method of protection I actually use is "abstinence". I don't engage in unsafe computing. I Just Say No.