The easy & free way to prevent viruses & spyware
Saturday, December 4, 2010 at 2:25PM Now more than ever we use the internet just about every time we turn on our computers. You browse Facebook, check your banking online, purchase products online and so on. The internet is a great resource for information and entertainment but it's also filled with child predators, scam artists and lots of viruses and spyware. How does a person go about staying safe online? How do you protect your kids from child predators or limit their exposure to questionable content on the internet? How do you keep getting infected with all that spyware that ends up costing you a fortune to get fixed at the local PC repair shop?
This guide is intended to help you understand a bit more about internet threats and how to prevent most of them from ever affecting you and your computers.
Let's start at your network. You probably have a broadband connection of some type (cable, dsl or satellite) and hopefully you have a router that grabs your internet connection and lets you share it with all the computers in your home. These routers are usually from manufacturers such as Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, etc. A properly setup router is your #1 line of defense for your network and home computers.
Here are a few things that you must check in your routers configuration in order to be sure that your network is secure. (Please refer to the setup guide for your router, or go to the manufacturers website and download the manual for your specific router)
- Make sure that you have your routers firewall enabled. Firewalls should NEVER be off, ever. There is absolutely no excuse to not have this vital security feature enabled on your router.
- Make sure that if you do have a wireless router that it is password protected with WPA or WPA2 encryption and a strong password of at least 8 numbers and letters. If your router does not support WPA encryption then please check with the router's manufacturer for a possible firmware update or invest in a newer router. WEP encryption is easily broken within a few minutes by anyone with a reasonable knowledge of wireless security.
- Setup an account at OpenDNS.org and replace your ISP(Internet service providers) default DNS servers with the ones provided by OpenDNS. There is a great guide here on how to go about changing those settings and getting OpenDNS running on your network. OpenDNS will protect you against phishing sites and malware as well as give you custom control over what sites you want blocked throughout your home and even filter out several categories of sites, such as adult, drugs, etc.
Following those steps should eliminate a majority of your headaches, especially if you block out adult sites and P2P file sharing sites. Most spyware stems from surfing websites in those categories along with social networking website exploits.
Now what about virus scanning and spyware protection on your actual Windows XP/Vista/7 computers? Well that's a good question, here are my recommendations for how to add a 2nd layer of protection to individual computers.
- Download and install Microsoft's Security Essentials Antivirus. It's free, it's very light on system resources so it won't slow down your computer. You don't need to spend a fortune on Norton, Trend or McAfee as this program works just as well based on independent lab tests. It's a very easy program to understand and unobtrusive as well.
- Use a different browser than Internet Explorer. Do yourself a favor and download FireFox orGoogle Chrome. These 2 browsers are not only faster than Internet Explorer but have wonderful add-ons that will block out web page ads which are known to carry spyware inside of them. ForFireFox please download AdBlock Plus and for Google Chrome I suggest using AdThwart to block ads on web pages and protect against potentially harmful ones.
- Download and install SpywareBlaster. It's free as long as you don't mind manually updating it every now and again. The program will inoculate your computer against already known malicious webpages and links. This piece of software is another quick & easy way to prevent that pesky spyware infection before it manifests at all.
There you have it! If you follow the steps outlined above your internet experience will be a much safer and less stressful place for you to work and play in. Hope this helps someone out there! :)