Derrick
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- Joined
- Nov 22, 2010
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The Internet is an amazingly wonderful place and tool, however, just like any powerful tool, it needs to be treated with both respect and caution. I have been online for many years now, and I feel that one of the leading causes of trouble and danger online is that few people understand the risks when connecting their PC to the Internet, and few people understand how to protect their PC and their families from these threats.
In this post I hope to give you three easy steps to protect your computer, and in doing so, make the Internet a safer place for you and others.
1) Antivirus, antivirus, antivirus
I don’t know how to say this enough. It does not matter even if your computer never connects to the Internet. Your computer — unless it is running Linux — needs an antivirus. There are hundreds of millions of computers connected online without antiviruses.
These computers are no longer destroyed by the virus, but instead are used by criminal cartels in several different ways: to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks at people they intend to blackmail, to relay Viagra spam to the world, to steal your personal log-in information such as your banking details, or to hack your personal data for criminal purposes.
There are several free anti-viruses available online, but here are three that I can recommend to the home user that wants to keep their computer and information safe:
- Panda Cloud ( http://www.cloudantivirus.com/ )
- Avast Free Home Edition ( http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html )
- AVG Free Edition ( http://free.avg.com/ )
2) Patching your computer
Patching your computer with the latest updates for your operating system is not a “nice to have”, it’s a necessity. When an operating system is released to the public, it has lots of bugs and errors in the code that criminals and their viruses exploit to compromise your system. Companies like Microsoft do eventually release updates to fix these flaws so it’s important to make sure you always have Microsoft Windows Update Manager switched on.
3) Protect your computer from Malware
Malware (or Spyware) is software designed mostly to monitor your browsing activity. It reports to a criminal element for targeted spamming or is designed to direct your browser to websites (i.e. porn websites) to lure you into buying their “products”.
While not a virus, malware is one step away from being a virus and a bad malware infection can often lead to a virus infection. To keep yourself safe from malware you need to:
- Use a secure browser like Firefox ( http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ )
- Have a malware scanner and remover like MalwareBytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/)
So those are the three things you can do in order to protect your computer and yourself. If you intend to go online and use the internet, you need to have followed the three basic steps I have listed above.
Anything less and you are compromising your computer, yourselves and others.
In this post I hope to give you three easy steps to protect your computer, and in doing so, make the Internet a safer place for you and others.
1) Antivirus, antivirus, antivirus
I don’t know how to say this enough. It does not matter even if your computer never connects to the Internet. Your computer — unless it is running Linux — needs an antivirus. There are hundreds of millions of computers connected online without antiviruses.
These computers are no longer destroyed by the virus, but instead are used by criminal cartels in several different ways: to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks at people they intend to blackmail, to relay Viagra spam to the world, to steal your personal log-in information such as your banking details, or to hack your personal data for criminal purposes.
There are several free anti-viruses available online, but here are three that I can recommend to the home user that wants to keep their computer and information safe:
- Panda Cloud ( http://www.cloudantivirus.com/ )
- Avast Free Home Edition ( http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html )
- AVG Free Edition ( http://free.avg.com/ )
2) Patching your computer
Patching your computer with the latest updates for your operating system is not a “nice to have”, it’s a necessity. When an operating system is released to the public, it has lots of bugs and errors in the code that criminals and their viruses exploit to compromise your system. Companies like Microsoft do eventually release updates to fix these flaws so it’s important to make sure you always have Microsoft Windows Update Manager switched on.
3) Protect your computer from Malware
Malware (or Spyware) is software designed mostly to monitor your browsing activity. It reports to a criminal element for targeted spamming or is designed to direct your browser to websites (i.e. porn websites) to lure you into buying their “products”.
While not a virus, malware is one step away from being a virus and a bad malware infection can often lead to a virus infection. To keep yourself safe from malware you need to:
- Use a secure browser like Firefox ( http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ )
- Have a malware scanner and remover like MalwareBytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/)
So those are the three things you can do in order to protect your computer and yourself. If you intend to go online and use the internet, you need to have followed the three basic steps I have listed above.
Anything less and you are compromising your computer, yourselves and others.