If your home computer has never been struck down by a virus and you think the problem is exaggerated or a thing of the past, beware - both the FBIand Scotland Yard predict this year will be twice as bad as last year, writes Arminta Wallace

'Oh, by the way," the voice at the other end of the line said casually, "I think your computer has a virus." A virus? Me? Not possible, surely. I loathe e-mail and use it only when absolutely necessary. I never - ever - surf the Internet. In technology terms I'm the equivalent of the little old lady who drives the Morris Minor. But sure enough, within 24 hours, colleagues and friends were phoning or mailing to say they had received bogus e-mails from me and - though not in so many words, naturally - would I mind not passing it on to them, thanks very much. I felt as if I had contracted some obscure form of pox. I also felt very alone.

When you work from home, you have no in-house IT whizzes to call on when a virus strikes. There's just you, your laptop and a black hole of worry. Will it get worse? Will it destroy your operating system? Will it chew up your files? And here's the bad news.

Both the FBI and Scotland Yard say 2002 will be a worse year for viruses than 2001, which, according to CERT, a US government-funded emergency response team from Carnegie Mellon University, was twice as bad as the previous year. CERT logged a whopping 52,658 reports of hack attacks last year, double the amount from the year 2000.

Yeah, right, you're thinking, but that's in the US. Well, think again.

"I get, I'd say, about 10 panic phone calls a week," says Ken Mahony, head consultant at Stonebridge Computer Services Ltd, based in Shankill, Dublin. "And it's all due to corruption and viruses. The most typical cases would be somebody saying, 'oh God, I've just lost a week's work', or a couple of days' work - but we've had people who lost several years' worth of data. We could spend all our time on virus protection and disaster recovery plans alone."

Time for the good news. Most of what we technophobes call "viruses" aren't actually viruses at all; they're worms. And while you won't be overjoyed if your computer has been invaded by a worm, at least it will probably confine itself to e-mail.

Worms don't chew up files; instead they happily burrow their way across cyberspace, using online address books as transport, in a high-tech version of the chain letter. And if that sounds like something out of Harry Potter, it will hardly come as a surprise that a number of worms, such as the infamous Code Red, have become international celebrities. It was triggered at 1 a.m. on August 1st last, spread at the rate of 2,000 computers a minute, daubed websites worldwide with the slogan "Hacked by Chinese!" and forced the Pentagon to pull the plug on its sites for four days.

Or the Love Bug, which spread by the ingenious means of planting the words "I Love You" in the e-mail subject heading. Or the first recorded worm, a character named Morris, which was developed 13 years ago (the Jurassic Period, in techno-time) by the son of a computer scientist and was supposed to copy itself just once on each infected computer. But the bug contained a bug of its own. It kept on copying itself until it used up all the processing power inside each computer and brought the machine to a stop, doing an estimated $98 million worth of damage in the process.

More malicious worms are, of course, being developed all the time. As you read this, some anti-virus expert somewhere on the planet is having nightmares about the Warhol worm, a hyper-virulent critter which, it's feared, could infect hundreds of thousands of machines worldwide within 15 minutes - hence the name. Warhol hasn't kicked in yet, luckily, but don't run away with the idea that there's nothing really vicious on the loose. Trojans, for instance, aka Trojan Horses.

"Basically," says Ken Mahony, "they come into your network and open up and cause havoc. They do a lot of wiping of documents, and they mess around with macros. Depending on the type of Trojan, they can wipe machines, or just wipe Excel documents or Word documents. But we class all viruses as nasty, and a potential threat to critical data, operating systems and many other areas of computing."

With all this spiteful cyberlife just waiting to attack the computer in your living-room - and we haven't even mentioned hijackers or mutants or stealth viruses - you really are living dangerously if you don't: a) arm yourself with anti-virus software; and b) update it regularly so new viruses don't slip through your security net.

Even for a technophobe, this is easy to do: just go to one of the big online anti-virus outfits such as Norton (www.norton.com) or McAfee (www.mcafee.com), sign up and pay up. And don't use free online anti-virus software: the real thing is much better in the long term and it's not as expensive as you might think - about $50 should sort most people out.

Everybody is aware that they can get infected by downloading material from the Internet, but you should be just as careful with e-mail.

"If you get an e-mail and you think it looks dodgy, just delete it," says Mahony. That goes both for e-mail from strangers and, increasingly, for e-mail from people you know.

"It used to be enough just to ignore unsolicited attachments, but the way that it's going now is, you'll receive an e-mail from somebody that you know, and the attachment will contain a virus. So, say you get an e-mail from your sister which says 'photos of the baby!', of course you're going to open the attachment - and bang, you're infected. That's one that we came up against recently."

Attachments which contain viruses often feature extensions such as .exe or .vbs, so give those a wide berth. However, if you use Outlook or Outlook Express to send e-mail, you may not realise that these programmes can be set to open attachments automatically.

As this is how I became unwittingly infected with a worm called Badtrans, I'd advise you to go and - as we virus experts say - close the hole at once. You'll find the relevant operations in the "View" menu; go through "Layout" until you get to "Preview Pane" and make sure it's switched off.

IN ADDITION, anyone who works from home needs to keep a wary eye on those other potentially troublesome cyberpests, teenagers. "One of my clients had three viruses on her machine - and she had anti-virus software," recalls Mahony.

"What had happened was, she was working away, concentrating on what she was doing - and she didn't notice that her son had uninstalled her anti-virus software. So the rule for that is, if you have a home machine and you also have a son or daughter who's downloading this or that, don't use that machine for work - it really isn't a good idea."

For an initial consultation fee of more than €600, Stonebridge Computer Services will spend a day at your home and set you up with a customised disaster recovery plan, a personal consultant to whom you can appeal for help five days a week and regular updates concerning new viruses.

Other companies offer different types of service and won't always come to you, so it's difficult to make direct comparisons, but to take a few examples: The Computer Hospital on Lower Stephen Street, Dublin, will clean your machine for €123.75 and recover your data for €180; Computers Unlimited in Phibsboro offers a basic evaluation for €45, after which, says Karen Boyd, it can run to a couple of hundred euros, depending on how much damage has been done to the machine; Multitech Computers in Parnell Street charges €70 an hour.

Everybody, however, agrees on one thing: computer viruses are here to stay.

"As long as computers exist, viruses will exist," says Ken Mahony, "because they tend to be one step ahead. Like burglars, dangerous drivers and drunks, viruses will always be with us."