This is one subject that’s been in news quite a lot lately. A whole army of Worms is on loose and the interesting part is that the target has been mostly Microsoft. Do I smell a rat here? Nah.I am just joking about rats.
The Begining:
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The most fundamental step in any protection for the PC(home or otherwise) is to have the Operating System up-to-date with the latest patches(One finds that this can be very boring with the Windows OS as they appear to come up with patches every other day). A sound OS is a good start to protect the rest of the components.
Surfing Habits:
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Assuming that one has all the relevent patches installed, the next thing is to have healthy surfing habits. Do not visit any site that even remotely mentions anything about hacks, cracks, serials and other illegal tools. More often than not, these sites have sniffers, scanners, snoops that can capture your IP address and install a remote admin backdoor.
Your browser:
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Configure your Internet Browser(IE, Netscape or others of the breed) for maximum security. In most browsers, this is a very simple task, fully menudriven and user friendly. One can even revert back to the original config. Try and use email clients like Eudora which are more secure that MS Outlook(and Outlook Express). Eudora is not affected by any VB script bugs, viruses and their relatives. One can import the contact list from Outlook into Eudora, so thats not an issue anymore. If you are totally addected to Outlook, get all patches and upgrades regularly.
Personal Firewalls:
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Instal a very good personal firewall to prevent any illegal activity on/from the PC. I recommend the ZoneAlarm Pro with web filtering as I have found it to offer the best protection for the SOHO PCs. For large networked systems, there are other elaborate solutions that will not be discussed here. ZoneAlarm Pro is extremely user friendly, the configuration is guided and very simple, settings are very flexible.in short a very neat package.
Antivirus Packages:
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There are very few to choose from(I mean the really good ones). Norton AV, McAfee, QuickHeal are amongst the best. I personally use McAfee as I have found it to be more versatile with regard to detection of suspicious activities in one’s system. Updates are also more frequent(It’s my perception anyway) and it’s less memory intensive. QuickHeal is nother very good product and it’s a natively developed product too.
Update the AV system regularly(one can autoschedule the updates to occur at chosen intervals), I definitely recommend an update every other day as the Av developers come up with updates frequently.
Summing Up:
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Finally, there is a limit up to which we can depend on these solutions; it’s best to develope safe computing habits. Avoid using your floppies in any other PC apart from your own, download with care(from sources that are safe) and if your system suddenly slows down, get an expert to help you out, you may have one of those worms/new virus breeding in your system and emailing itself to god know how many people.
Happy Computing!