What’s up everybody? It’s Eddie Z here from EZ Trading Computers, and you’re watching Trading Computer Secrets.
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In this video, I want to show you one important way to prevent getting viruses on your computer. Unfortunately, one of the most common ways we get viruses these days is by either downloading them when we download a program or download our file, or from opening an email from a so-called trusted source that has a link in it.
So to use this technique, the first thing we want to do is prevent our browser from automatically opening things we download… things like PDFs and other types of files that automatically open. So first I’m going to show you how to do this in Chrome.
In Chrome, what you want to do is go over here to your three dots in the upper right corner, that is your menu button in Chrome. Go ahead and click that button. Go ahead and then click Settings. And then in the search box type downloads.
I want to draw your attention down here to downloads. And you see where it says open certain file types automatically after downloading? That means you’ve set the browser to automatically open certain types of files after they’ve downloaded.
For example, a PDF might automatically open if you’ve downloaded it. We want to stop your browser from doing that, so we want to click Clear. Now, if that wasn’t there, that means Chrome was already set to not automatically open anything.
The second thing we want to do, it says right here: ask where to save each file before downloading. Generally it’ll just put it in the downloads folder, which is fine, or you can ask where to save.
Now I think this is a good idea to leave this on because it will automatically remind you that you’re downloading something and you’re saving it to your computer. But just because it’s saved to your computer doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to open.
There’s something we can do, that I’m going to show you in a second, to verify that it’s a legitimate file with no viruses.
Now here in Firefox, what you want to do is very similar, to turn off automatically opening a downloaded file. Go up here to the menu… looks like the three dashes here. Click the menu. Then go ahead and click Options.
Once you get to options, you want to scroll down to where it says Applications right here and you’ll see this box: Choose how Firefox handles the files you download from the web or the applications you use while browsing.
Now notice I have it set, for example, PDF: Preview in Firefox. We want to change this to Always ask. So it’s going to ask me whether I want to open the file, or whether or not I want to save the file. You should really have all of these set to Always ask.
So I have GoToWebinar and all of these MP3 files set to Always ask. Here’s one I have that’s old. I don’t even use this program any more, but I’ll put it on Always ask. But these really should be on Always ask. This way you can scan these downloads and make sure that they’re virus free.
Okay, so what we’ve done is we’ve told our browsers to not automatically open files that we’ve downloaded. This way we can use this really neat tool I’m about to show you and be able to scan those files for viruses.
So this tool, it’s actually called VirusTotal, so go to virustotal.com. Let the website load. This is a really, really neat program because it’s owned by Google and will actually take any file that you upload (I’m going to show you how to do that in a second), and it’ll scan it through at least 60 of the best antivirus programs out there.
I’m going to go ahead and download a file. I’m on EZBreakouts.com (as you guys know, this is my trading website). And I’m going to download the EZBreakouts World’s Greatest Chart Pattern Mastery Book right here. I’m going to click that.
Now you see in Chrome, it’s now actually asking me where I want to save the file instead of automatically opening it. Obviously, it’s a PDF. It’s asking me where I want to save it. I’m going to save it here in Downloads. So I click Save.
Now I can go back to VirusTotal, and I can click Choose a File. So I click Choose file, and I’m going to go to Downloads. And here it is: EZBreakouts World’s Greatest Chart Pattern Mastery Book. I click on there, I click Open.
VirusTotal has run its full scan and you can see all of the different virus programs it’s run this file through. So Ad-Aware, Avast, AVG, Baidu, all of these different virus protection programs… it has now scanned my file to make sure it’s free of viruses.
See this one here, ESET, that’s a a really good antivirus program… Kaspersky… Malwarebytes… and it has not detected anything. So you can feel safe in opening this file.
For fun, let’s just take a look at another one. I’m going to click Choose File. I’m looking at my Downloads folder and here’s a program I downloaded last week. I’m just going to take a quick look at this and see what VirusTotal thinks of this. It’s called adguard.
So it’s running its thing, and it shows zero out of 72, and we can see it says Undetected for all of them. So you can do that.
Now let me show you how you can use this when somebody sends you a link in email, because one of the places we get a lot of viruses is when a known source, like a friend, sends you an email saying, “Hey, check out this link. This is really cool.”
But sometimes your friend’s email may have been hacked, and the hackers are using it to transmit viruses. So let me show you how you can check for safety there.
Here’s my email. I just got this email from Zendesk, and they’re doing some kind of a webinar here, and they’ve sent me this link. Now Zendesk I normally trust. But who knows, maybe they’re sending me a virus-riddled link.
So I can go ahead and right-click on the button, and click Copy link address. I then can go back to VirusTotal and click URL. Then I can go ahead and paste that link right into the search. Go ahead and click. And there we go… zero out of 71. No engines detected this URL.
In summary, VirusTotal is a very neat tool you can use to scan any link, any URL somebody sends you, or any file somebody sends you, or any file you download, to make sure it doesn’t have any viruses. It’s going to run that virus protection over more than 60 different virus software programs.
I hope you found this tool useful.
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My name’s Eddie Z. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video.