How to be secure while surfing the net on your PC?
Days past away when there was dial-up and the speed was slow, now almost everybody has DSL connection at home. Eventually, you will face security, virus, spyware, adwares, trojan horses and etc problems. This post will explain how and what softwares, mostly free and/or open source softwares and tools to prevent and enhance your personal security while having access to broadband internet connection.
Let’s agree on that all of the above mentioned stuff is applicable to Windows OS stations. Agree that Linux/UNIX based Operations Systems have almost none of the above mentioned problems. However, I don’t claim that you cannot hack them, exploit or have trojans on them, yes you can BUT you must be very much skillful and probabilities you get a virus is almost none. Having stated this we suppose that we are talking about Windows, particularly Windows XP.
If you are using broadband at home with only one single PC here’s what I recommend to install:
- AVG Antivirus and AVG AntiSpyware from Grisoft
- ZoneAlarm by Check Point
- Have the latest patches and updates installed on your WindowsXP
- Optionally to AVG have ClamAV win32 installed
- Use Mozilla Firefox or at least Opera web browsers instead of Internet Explorer from Microsoft. Yes, at some point IE has more security issues, attract more viruses then the other browsers.
- Have your phone line closed to make international calls. You can have somebody from your Telco assist you on this.
If you have a single PC connected these softwares will help you to defend yourself against malware, adware, spyware and various viruses and threats that can be easily found if you are using internet.
Now if you have multiple PC network I can say that it is more or less same except that you might want to install some kind of firewall/router centrally in your network. That is apart from each clients personal firewall and antivirus softwares.
- Let modem handle the connection by itself. This can be done via modem’s web configuration panel. Most of the modems nowadays ship with some kind of strip down linux versions and have a web interface to control.
- If your number of PCs in your network is 1-10, you can use your modem to act as a network server - DHCP,Router, Gateway, DNS, Proxy, Firewall.
- If you have more then 10, I suggest you might consider having additional PC to act as a network server. I recommend IPcop or its fork Endian Community Edition. If you just need the work to be done without much hardware investments you might consider building your own firewall/router with one of the linux/bsd distros.
- Convince you friends/family/colleagues use Linux!
There are always threats day by day and the most important rule of thumb here is to make sure you follow the updates from software vendors, subscribing to their E-Mail lists, news RSS and read the updates from their websites. Also good to join some kind of forum local in your area to be aware of the latest threats and issues. And of course visit less on porn(!) and warez offering websites! Most of the time they contain viruses and trojans as well as various kind of adware/spyware/malware.
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Welcome to Arstan's personal blog. This blog includes tips on Linux, Apache, MySQL, Shell Scripts. Hardware/software and internet technologies reviews and updates.
[...] mentioned a few tips previously here and now I’ve found another great tool that helps you to stay even more secure in Windows XP. [...]