Opt out of marketing databases. Many organizations, including credit bureaus, motor vehicles departments, and direct marketers let you choose not to have information shared with marketers. Keep your antivirus program up to date. About 300 new computer viruses appear each month. Although only a small portion of those make it into the wild, incidents such as CIH, ExploreZip, and Melissa demonstrate that the risks of virus infection are clearly growing.
Most antivirus companies post updates within days of new attacks.
To detect the new viruses and disinfect your system, you must update your antivirus program once a month and whenever a major threat occurs. Nuke newsgroup messages. Newsgroup postings are fertile ground for spammers. Update your OS and browser. Microsoft and Netscape are constantly posting updates and patches for security holes in the respective OSs, browsers, and e-mail clients.