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By Mohammad Yousef | June 2004
Contrary to popular belief, combating evil is a piece of cake. All you have to do is follow these simple rules.
Use a good anti-virus and keep it updated- the second part is equally important as the first. Your anti-virus is quite useless against new worms and viruses unless you update it. Norton AntiVirus, McAfee VirusScan and PC-cillin are all great anti-viruses but if money is your excuse, you could try Grisoft’s AVG anti-virus.
Secondly, run a firewall. Whether it is the McAfee Personal Firewall, Norton Internet Security, Black ICE or any other firewall that you choose, it’s up to you. Even the Internet Connection Firewall that comes with Windows is better than nothing. There are free firewalls that are even better than commercial ones. I use Zone Labs’ ZoneAlarm which is one of the best out there. Another free firewall is Sygate, but I haven’t tried it and I heard it’s not as easy to use as ZoneAlarm. You can find more information on firewalls at firewallguide.com.
The latest form of security and privacy threat is spyware and adware. Spyware removal tools galore, but I do not recommend using just any one. It was found that some of the not so trustworthy companies put spyware and adware within their removal tools! I use Spybot- Search & Destroy and Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware 6 and so should you. You need to update these also.
Update windows and download new patches. I’m not going into details about this one, but here’s an example proving its importance. If all Windows XP users downloaded patches regularly, the Blaster worm wouldn’t have spread at all.
Don’t open e-mail attachments even if you get them from close people. Check if it was really sent to you by the person you believe it came from. However, it’s silly to think every attachment is a virus. In most cases, it has to be an executable file or a zipped file with an executable in it. You can identify an executable from the file’s extension: “exe”, “pif”, “scr” or “com”.
Be careful when downloading stuff from the net. Those free goodies might not turn out as good as you think they are.
Even with all this, you must know that knowledge is your ultimate
sword to protect yourself. Educate yourself and learn. Learn about new threats and methods of prevention from them.
If you want to take your security up to the next level, there are Intrusion Detection Systems, Vulnerability Scanners… But for the typical user, taking the measures I mentioned are enough. See, it is simple to protect yourself.
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