I have been asked the best way to deal with harmful e-mail attachments. To be really frank you should be afraid, be very very afraid. There is as much you can do, I mean, with 85 percent of computers still running on Microsoft’s Windows you are a potential victim. While most suspicious e-mails turn out to be ineffective, the potential of them being real should be handled with utmost care.

Emails had a modest start with only text messages and nothing more. Now with the advancements of receiving and sending images, songs, video and even archived folders, comes advanced security risks. Initial floppy disks were the primary source of virus infections, which gave way to CDs and now we have the ever accessible flash drives. During the evolution of the primary source of virus infestation e-mails were always treated as a secondary source and were to quite an extent neglected and unregulated.

It’s important to know how to safely regulate e-mail attachments, executable attachments (.exe) are the most common source of a virus attack. These programs are a quick way for penetrating an internal corporate network, which, if left untreated, will have costly and significant side effects.

Protection against malicious attachments requires you to first of all have an anti-virus security and secondly keeping it updated. Normally, the IT staff of your company has its livelihood dependent on the protection of your systems, however you should enforce that your computer security must be updated every week.

The problem with emails is that they can be easily forged and replicated, therefore assuming that the name in the from-box or the e-mail address in the properties truly identifies the sender; these fields can be easily faked.

The only way to prevent a virus attack through email has been taught to us by USA and Russia during the cols war. The magic words are ‘trust but verify’.