Basic antivirus security rules

1. Choose the websites you visit carefully, you can threaten your computer by visiting dubious websites voluntarily. Further, you should pay attention on what links you are actually clicking - do not click on warning windows of fake antivirus programs, fake dating sites, non-existent discounts in fictitious shops, pop-up windows posing to be social networks etc.

2. Do not respond to e-mails requesting your login details and passwords. Furthermore, do not open attachments from dubious e-mail addresses and do not click on links in spam e-mails.

3. Download only the most necessary programs (videoplayers, text editors, etc.). There is no need to download performance improvers for your computer, shareware, or so-called "entertainment" programs which are useless. Most of them are full of spyware, viruses and computer worms.

?4. Before using antispyware and other programs for removing malicious software, contact your computer network administrator first. Using more antivirus and antispyware programs at once might cause malfunction in detection of infected files. Furthermore, Windows OS might not work properly as well.

5. Update not only programs which use the internet network (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Skype, Spotify etc.), but also programs, which do not use the internet.

6. Back-up all the important data. Most of us have work, study or private data in our computers, which we do not want to lose. We recommend backing up your data at least once a month (and even more frequently files with higher-frequency of changes). You can back your files up to other computer, CD/DVD, cloud storage (OneDrive, Dropbox), large capacity USB flash drive or external drives. Your computer could become infected to such extent that operating system is vastly damaged and your data could not be recovered again. Furthermore, there might be a hardware flaw in your disk and you can also lose your data.

7. USB flash drive safety, everybody has at least one USB flash drive, but not everyone realizes, that flash drives are one of the causes of virus infection spread. To check if you flash drive is infected, go to "My Computer" right-click the USB drive you want to check and choose option check by antivirus program.

8. All university employees should contact their computer network administrator if they suspect any computer to be infected, contact Computer Center preferably through Helpdesk - at https://helpdesk.upol.cz