1. Get an anti-virus. I use McAfee and I've heard that Norton makes a good one.
2. Make sure your AV has the latest virus database update.
3. DO NOT open any email attachments

If you are expecting a file attachment from someone, make sure the subject/body of the email reflects what you expect. You will also get plenty of infected email coming from people both known & unknown. Here's a tip on that...

Email viruses work like this - a person opens an attachment from an infected email. The virus installs itself then emails itself to everyone in the persons address book using a spoofed return address - the return address can be anyone in the address book (even permutations of parts of email addresses). So when you get a virus email, it is not from the person whose return address is listed.

It so happens that my email address is on thousands of peoples PCs. So when a virus infection like this breaks out, I get tons of flame email about how I infected some PC yadayada even though I am not sending the infected emails.

So word of warning - don't complain to the sender of a virus; it did not come from them. We were hit with a double whammy: the virus plus a hacker trying to take over our home page and forcing us to view tons of unwanted popups. It wasn't pleasant and it took hard work to hijack their attacks, but we did it with help from the following sources:

• Installing Ad-Aware from LavaSoftUSA.Com
• Installing CookieWall from AnalogX.Com
• Visiting the Online Forum at LavaSoft to get free technical help. They were great!

I hope you find this helpful. - Barbara Jennings