Essential Computer Security

Have you received any emails lately about your eBay or Paypal account being suspended due to suspected fraud? Perhaps you have been notified by a financial institution (often a bank that you do not even do business with in the first place), that they have upgraded their systems and they need you to click on a link to enter your username and password for verification. These are examples of phishing attacks, or phishing scams. The email is the “bait” to lure you (the “phish”) into surrendering sensitive or confidential information such as your passwords or credit card numbers. You can protect yourself against becoming a phishing victim by following the 5 simple steps I outlined in this About.com Internet / Network Security article.

Andy Greenberg wrote an article for Forbes.com titled Accounting For Human Error, which illustrates how human beings, the users themselves, are the weakest link in the security chain. Enterprises spend millions, or even tens of millions of dollars on security technology and security expertise to ensure their networks and data are protected, but it only takes one person breaking policy (whether through negligence, ignorance, or malicious intent) and the data is compromised. He is not the first one to point this out.
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I used to regularly remove programs I hadn’t used in the past 30 days or any data that was more than a week old in order to salvage every last byte of hard drive space. That is no longer necessary. Now computers come standard with 250 Gb or larger drives. Even a terabyte drive is reasonably priced for many users. That changes the problem from one of scrounging hard drive space to one of organizing and managing the vast expanse of data. To learn more about how to manage and partition hard drive space in Windows Vista, read this article I wrote for Biztech Magazine.

To tell the truth, these are almost the only 5 products worth considering, not just the top. There are hundreds of anti-spyware products available, including many that claim to be anti-spyware but are malware products in and of themselves. Products like these 5 (Windows Defender, AdAware Personal SE, Spybot Search & Destroy, Webroot Spy Sweeper, and McAfee Anti-Spyware) represent commercial products from vendors you can trust. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you still running your computer with no antivirus or other malware protection installed? Do you have really old security software installed that has not been updated to protect against current threats? Do you just like to play with new, cutting edge products to see what new features are coming out? If any of these scenarios applies to you, perhaps you should visit the Windows Live OneCare 2.0 site and download a Beta copy of the yet-to-be-released software. Read the rest of this entry »

Depending on the activities you engage in and the sites you visit, you can get some questionable, or sometimes outright malicious stuff installed on your computer. When you have a PC for your kids, or if you are sharing a PC with your kids, this can be an even bigger problem. Windows XP and Vista offer System Restore that will allow you to “go back in time” and restore your computer to a previous state, but there are even better solutions available as well. Windows Vista has excellent parental controls, but if you are running Windows XP you have to install the right tool for the job. Microsoft developed Windows Steady State to allow users of Windows XP more control over how the system is accessed and used (particularly by children) and to provide users (or parents) with a simple method for returning the computer to its formerly pristine state.

Companies understand the importance of data. Hardware and software can be replaced, but lost data can’t. Those companies that don’t truly understand the value of consistently backing up critical data are probably mandated to do so anyway by one of the various regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA. Companies also have administrators that are paid to be expert in managing data and they are tasked with performing the backups. That is great for companies. What about home computer users? Read the rest of this entry »