The second component of good malware protection is good housekeeping. What I mean by that is ensuring that all installed software is kept up to date.

New exploits against operating systems and other software are constantly being discovered and used by hackers and these are usually quickly patched by software producers. Most software suppliers these days will provide you with an option to take care of this automatically or at the very least to notify you when an update is available.

Operating systems in particular should be set to download and install updates automatically overnight in order to stay ahead of the bad guys. All other software e.g. Adobe Reader, Flash, Java etc should also where possible be configured to update automatically or if this isn't possible then you should visit the manufacturers website frequently to check for updates and manually download and install them.

If all your installed software is kept bang up to date then you are at much lower risk of your system being compromised by an attacker expoiting a known vulnerability to install a Trojan or spam mailer on to your PC

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