I am departing from the radio theme a bit, but I have been hearing of some folks having to deal with computer viruses/trojans/malware so I thought I would pass along some tips on keeping the bad guys out of your computers.
There is an excellent website sponsored by CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team, not the disaster folks) at Carnegie Mellon University. Their Home Network Security overview explains the “what, why, and how” of computer security and is written for home users with no technical background.
While the CERT document lays out several steps to secure your computer, I want to emphasize some key elements.
- Back-up your data. Back-up your data. etc… If your system goes down for any reason, virus or component failure, you should have the data that is important to you stored as a copy some place other than on one computer. Back-up as often as you would be comfortable re-creating the data. Be prepared to re-create (or live without) everything you did on the computer since the last back-up.
- Turn on automatic updates for Windows. Every second Tuesday of the month is “Patch Tuesday” when Microsoft releases the latest updates for Windows operating systems. Many of these updates fix security vulnerabilities that could allow access to your computer. As recently as February 08, Microsoft sent out fixes for security flaws that would allow remote access to a computer by only visiting an infected web site, bypassing anti-virus programs- no attachments or running of files needed. Keep it patched!
- Use a router. All modern routers up include at least a rudimentary NAT firewall, and better ones have more sophisticated SPI designs. Acronyms aside, the router is the first line of defense against an intruder. They have to get through the router before they can get to your computer, and most hackers pass up the routers for easier pickings.
- Install an Anti-Virus program. There are dozens of AV programs and NONE of them are 100% effective in protecting your computer against attack. 90% may be asking too much. Don’t count on the AV software because new threats appear daily and you might encounter them before the AV software company does.
Some free options for Antivirus and security software follow- I am not necessarily endorsing these, and there are other programs out there. Stay away from anything that is promoted in a pop-up window or says “click here to check your computer security…” 99% of those are malware installers.
If you are a Comcast customer, you can get the Mcaffee security suite free at http://security.comcast.net/ -Personal note- I used this for a couple of years but have been disappointed with the way it slows down my system.
If you have one or two files that are suspicious, or your AV program says a certain file contains a virus but you think it might be a “false positive”, send it to http://www.virustotal.com/ They have a free battery of all the popular AV programs that will scan the file and give you the results.
http://free.grisoft.com/ww.homepage Is the home of AVG FREE, an excellent AV program. It can be a bit hard to navigate to the free download and I had a hard time getting the file to complete without timing out, but it is a decent program and you can’t blame Grisoft for trying to get you to buy the regular version and make a buck.
ThreatFire at http://www.threatfire.com/ is a relatively new AV program that is completely free (so far). I started using this recently and it has a low impact on system speed, but I have had one “false positive” so far. Threatfire claims to best their competition by concentrating on identifying viruses by their behavior, making it more effective against new viruses that have not been entered into AV databases yet.
Mcaffee has one other product that is free to anyone and I like it alot. Site Advisor at http://www.siteadvisor.com/ is a plug in for your web browser that gives a security rating to every website you visit. It also integrates with google searches so you see a flag by every search result: Green=safe, yellow=caution, red=bad. If you go to a red site the program will pop up a warning asking if you are sure you want to proceed. Note that Mcaffee sells a paid version of Site Advisor, but you get all of the functionality in the free version.
One last suggestion for the more technical computer user. Open DNS http://opendns.org/ provides a free DNS server that intercepts a lot of phishing spoofs and filters evil domains. There are also options for filtering adult websites and such but I would not trust it to keep an Internet connection completely “family friendly”- there is just too much stuff “out there” to keep the filters up to date. My experience is that their service is at least as fast as Comcast so there is no performance hit. Although it can’t filter everything, at least it stops some… and for a free service that is great. They make their $$$ by showing targeted links if you enter an unregistered URL rather than giving an error. Check your service providers agreement- they may disallow use of outside DNS servers (why?).
