USATODAY Article - Signs your PC’s under siege, and what you can do
USATODAY.com - Signs your PC’s under siege, and what you can do
Always use a personal firewall with a PC connected to a cable modem, DSL or wireless Internet service. Free ones are listed at www.free-firewall.org. Tip: Have the personal firewall set to at least the medium level of security.
• Buy anti-virus software, such as Norton AntiVirus, McAfee VirusScan or ZoneLabs Security Suite, and keep the subscription current. Set it to automatically check for updates. Tip: New PCs typically come with a free trial subscription from Norton or McAfee. However, you must subscribe after the trial period expires to continue getting updates.
- Robs Comment: DONT BUY NORTON ANTIVIRUS! It slows your System down to a crawl, Another one thay hooped a WinXP system I installed it on was Panda. Personally I find that AntiVir runs on Win95 machines and upwards and if running XP you can run AntiVir and AVG side by side comfortably.
• Enable Microsoft Windows Auto-Update to automatically download the latest security patches. Tip: Follow instructions to make sure downloaded patches are also automatically installed.
- Robs Comments - Get XP Antispy or Safe XP and tie down XP so it is more secure.
• No software vendor will ever send you patches via e-mail. If you get e-mail pretending to be a patch from Microsoft or any other vendor, delete it. Distrust all attachments. If you have even the slightest doubt, delete it without reading.
- Robs Comments - Agreed
• Back up all of your important documents and folders at least once a month, more often if you can stand it. Use complex passwords and periodically change passwords and PINs.
- Robs Comments - Sound Advice, I use A USB storage card and keep a copy important stuff there and also use FTP account around the net.
• Beware of spyware. If you can, use the Mozilla Firefox browser. If you must use Internet Explorer (IE), set the security settings to high; this will disable multimedia features of many Web sites, but also will block a main path intruders use to plant Web contagions. Tip: To set IE security to high, navigate to Tools, Internet options, Security settings.
• Install, use and regularly update Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy anti-spyware programs. Both are free for the downloading. Tip: Be extremely wary of counterfeit versions of Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, spelled slightly different; those are actually spyware.
• Consider switching to a non-IE browser, such as Mozilla’s Firefox.
——
Robs Additional Comments…:
• I personally get all the programs I normally need to fight spyware from http://www.filehippo.com/
• Anti-Spyware software I would pay for is CounterSpy or ZeroSpyware.
