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PC Security
Protecting your computer from malicious intent.
Its an unfortunate fact of life that there will always be people
who seek to exploit others, usually for profit, sometimes just for kicks.
Any computer, especially one with broadband internet access, is
a sitting target for many types of attack unless properly protected. There are
three main categories of protection you should always have active (and currently
updated) on your PC. If you do not believe your PC is properly protected, call
us, we can help.
Anti-Virus Protection
You should always have an actively running anti-virus
application on your computer. Viruses come in many forms with new ones appearing
everyday. These can cause a bewildering array of effects on your PC, from
relatively benign ones (although still unwanted) to ones that cause tremendous
destruction to your data.
Firewall
Under construction
Spyware Protection
Spyware is one of the newer nasties encountered on the internet.
The term spyware is generally used to describe a range of items including
adware, tracking cookies, trojans etc.
Spyware therefore takes many forms,
it may simply track your internet usage habits and report them back to
advertisers, or it may do worse. It can change your home page continually, alter
the results you get from search engines to send you to sites they wish you to
visit, they can record every key you type on your keyboard and report it back to
3rd partys, all this and more can be done without your consent or knowledge.
Your machine could even be hijacked and used as part of a botnet designed to
crash web servers or send out thousands of spam emails, yet you machine would
appear to be operating normally and you certainly would not see the evidence of
any spam sent in your normal outbox or sent mail folders.
Normally if a
machine has been infected by any spyware, it will have suffered multiple
infections by various different ones, and this is what usually gives rise to the
only clue the user has that there may be a problem - their machine starts to run
slower - sometimes so slowly as to be unusable. There can be many reasons why a
PC begins to run slowly, but all too often these days Spyware is a large
contributory factor, or indeed the sole culprit.
Spyware can be "contracted"
in many ways, often unscrupulous websites will install it (without your
permission) when you visit them. More commonly spyware is installed in the form
of a trojan, but what is a trojan? Remember the story of the Trojan horse? The
Greeks gave the people of Troy a large wooden horse, with a secret, it was
hollow and Greek soldiers were hidden inside waiting to attack. Well in a
similar manner with computers a trojan is a piece of software you do not want
which you receive hidden within another piece of software. The best way to avoid
this is to steer clear of any free software unless it comes from a reputable
source. If anything offers itself to you on the net, without you having
specifically looked for it, be wary. Unsolicited offers to give you a free
weather toolbar, or calendar, or animated cursors and smilies etc etc, all too
often contain unwanted spyware elements. Be wary of free software, this is
especially true in the case of anti-spyware products. Whilst there are some
excellent anti-spyware products available for no charge, there are many more
rogue anti-spyware products around. These rogue products will usually give false
positives (i.e. claim to have found spyware on your PC when in fact you may not
have any, or they may not have actually checked your PC at all!) and try to
entice you to pay for a "Full" or "Premium" version of their product in order to
remove the "infections" it has found.
At the risk of boring you and repeating the words once again, its very
important, be very wary of any free software. Especially if it offers itself to
you when you have not specifically looked for it.
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