by Brian Swartzfager

Nothing can ruin your day as quickly as a computer virus. You may receive a virus as an innocent-looking email attachment, or from a floppy disk with infected files, or even from a chat room. Once activated, a computer virus can do any number of things. It can destroy your files, take control of your computer, block your Internet connection, send copies of itself to other computers through email or chat programs, or format your entire hard drive.

"Unless you feel like wasting an awful lot of time rewriting papers or rebuilding your computer, you’d better keep your anti-virus protection up-to-date," says Spence Spenser of OIT Consulting Services.

Fortunately, OIT provides such anti-virus protection software. Last summer, OIT purchased a software license to distribute the latest McAfee and Virex anti-virus software products to university faculty, staff, and students. This means that you, as a member of the university community, can get anti-virus software to protect your work computer or your home computer at no charge.

The new anti-virus software can be obtained on CD from the OIT Software Licensing office (301.405.2986) for $10 (the cost of the media), or it can be downloaded for free from the web site of the OIT Virus Notification Program (which monitors virus threats to the university and provides tips for avoiding computer viruses).

To download the software, all you need is a web browser and a WAM computer account. If you don’t already have a WAM account, visit the OIT Help Desk in 1400 Computer and Space Sciences Building. Simply visit the Virus Notification Program web page at http://helpdesk.umd.edu/virus and select the link for "Anti-Virus Protection" on the left side of the page. It will lead you through the steps to download, install, and update the appropriate anti-virus software for your computer.

Even when your anti-virus software is up-to-date, brand-new viruses can sometimes slip past the anti-virus software, so it is important to still exercise caution when you receive a file via email or from a floppy disk. The Virus Notification Program also sends out alerts about new viruses via the FYI notification service and on the umd-vnp mailing list. To subscribe to the umd-vnp mailing list, send an email to majordomo@majordomo.umd.edu with no subject line and only the phrase "subscribe umd-vnp" (without quotation marks) in the message text. The account you write the message from will become subscribed to umd-vnp.

For more information about computer viruses in general, visit the Virus Notification Program web page at http://helpdesk.umd.edu/virus or contact the OIT Help Desk at 301.405.1500.

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