Hackers and Your Writing

The idea for this blog came from Charlotte Phillips blog http://charsbookreviews.blogspot.com/

Charlotte recently had an experience with a virus attack. About two weeks ago I went through the same thing.

Luckily, I have everything backed up, but that day+ wasted was pure torture. It got so bad that at one point I couldn't see anything on my screen. I actually contemplated throwing my trusty laptop away and getting a new one. HORROR! - love the little thing. When the red fuzz of anger cleared from my brain, I took a deep breath, and went to task. I defragged, did a chkdsk, and was finally able to see my screen. Then I was able to run an antivirus software...actually several. After all that (hours and hours) I was finally able to use my computer again.

What is with these people? Do they think it's fun and games to destroy people's work?

How do you prevent these things from happening? Do you constantly run an antivirus application? It slows your other applications down (painfully so at times) and that's only part of the issue. Don't forget about spyware. So now you have to run a spyware killer application too? Oh, and if you run on a wireless network...that's another can of worms. You have to make certain it's secure so no one else can use it or get on and see what you're doing. BEEN THERE!

Does anyone have some great suggestions on how to prevent these things from happening? Any great articles or tools to recommend?

For all you writers out there...if we can't beat the hackers and prevent their damage...we can make sure our writing gets saved. I recommend the Microsoft Home Server. It's a small, headless machine that you hook up to your network, then all your computers can use the Home Server to get backed up on a regular basis.