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Friday, May 13, 2011

Secu­rity Tips: How to Pro­tect Your Com­puter From Viruses





With mil­lions of com­puter users brows­ing the web at any given time, there are plenty of tar­gets for mali­cious coders. While com­puter experts don’t always know why coders choose to build harm­ful com­puter pro­grams, the fact is that it hap­pens all the time. Com­puter viruses can steal per­sonal infor­ma­tion, inter­fere with nor­mal oper­a­tions, attract spam and even shut down your computer’s hard drive. Pro­tect­ing your com­puter is crit­i­cal for brows­ing success.

Start With the Basics
Most com­puter sys­tems come with secu­rity fea­tures already in place. For exam­ple, the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem is pack­aged with Microsoft Win­dows Secu­rity Cen­ter. When you first open, boot up and reg­is­ter a new com­puter, you should make sure that this pro­gram is func­tion­ing. It will give basic pro­tec­tion against spy­ware, viruses and mal­ware. In addi­tion, a basic fire­wall is built into this pro­gram, pro­vid­ing addi­tional pro­tec­tion and stops for poten­tially harm­ful pro­grams. Upon acti­va­tion, don’t be sur­prised if your secu­rity sys­tem needs imme­di­ate updat­ing. Soft­ware that pro­tects your com­puter needs reg­u­lar and con­sis­tent updat­ing to stay use­ful. Viruses are con­stantly being gen­er­ated and the several-month lag between when your com­puter was made and when you first started using it can mean that the data­base the secu­rity sys­tem is loaded with is severely out-of-date.
Upgrade to Meet Your Needs
Many peo­ple oper­ate com­put­ers for a long time with only basic pro­tec­tion in place. How­ever, heavy com­puter users or those who have risky brows­ing habits can some­times ben­e­fit from upgrad­ing their virus, spy­ware and mal­ware pro­tec­tion, as well as using a fuller-featured fire­wall; this is espe­cially impor­tant if you use a net­worked com­puter sys­tem. Basic or free virus pro­tec­tion will still scan and update for viruses. Paid pro­grams, how­ever, offer more fea­tures, includ­ing ease-of-use and con­ve­nience fea­tures. The most impor­tant thing is to ver­ify the pub­lisher and make sure you are get­ting what is promised. Most well-known virus pro­tec­tion pro­grams, such as AVG and Nor­ton Secu­rity, have reviews avail­able to help you make your choice.
Learn About Spy­ware Risks
Spy­ware cre­ates risks that many com­puter users are not aware of. If you are only pro­tect­ing against viruses, you could be leav­ing your com­puter open to dam­age. Most peo­ple are famil­iar with spy­ware that ini­ti­ates and attracts annoy­ing ad pro­grams. Spy­ware, how­ever, can be much more mali­cious as well. Your shop­ping habits can be tracked by spy­ware. While not exactly harm­ful, some peo­ple con­sider this a breach of pri­vacy. The worst spy­ware pro­grams inter­fere with nor­mal oper­a­tions and can even track what you type, send­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion to peo­ple who want to steal your iden­tity. Some spy­ware redi­rects your browser to dif­fer­ent web addresses, increas­ing your risks of virus infec­tion and fraud.
How Viruses Work
The main dif­fer­ence between spy­ware and viruses is how they are spread. A virus repro­duces itself and attaches to any doc­u­ment that the com­puter sends, while spy­ware can be stored as a cookie or track­ing code. A virus is most often found trav­el­ing with a piece of com­puter soft­ware, such as a doc­u­ment, pic­ture or piece of music. When deal­ing with email, it is nec­es­sary to open an attach­ment to become infected, indi­cat­ing that, in most cases, the com­puter user must some­how invite the mali­cious soft­ware to repli­cate on their sys­tem. Of course, most peo­ple have no idea it is there or what is hap­pen­ing. Some of the sneaki­est and most harm­ful viruses actu­ally mas­quer­ade as virus pro­tec­tion soft­ware, mak­ing them extremely hard to detect. Because of this, it’s cru­cial to be famil­iar with your par­tic­u­lar virus pro­tec­tion pro­gram and know what it looks like and what the nor­mal scripts and prompts are dur­ing oper­a­tion. Viruses do some of the same things that spy­ware does; they just accom­plish it dif­fer­ently. An active virus can steal per­sonal infor­ma­tion, gen­er­ate ads or shut down your sys­tem, includ­ing the very virus pro­tec­tion pro­grams that can fix the issue.
Take Steps For Protection
Like any­thing, the best way to pro­tect against viruses is to be edu­cated. Become famil­iar with what mali­cious soft­ware may look like. If you get an email or are asked to down­load a file that you don’t rec­og­nize or looks sus­pi­cious, do your home­work. Research virus pro­tec­tion, spy­ware, mal­ware and fire­wall pro­grams and use them to their fullest capac­ity. Set the soft­ware to update and scan auto­mat­i­cally to make sure that the sys­tem is con­stantly mon­i­tored. In addi­tion, reg­u­larly check on the data­bases pub­lished by var­i­ous virus pro­tec­tion ser­vices; many will pro­vide lists of symp­toms and risks, as well as the stan­dard way the file gains access for no cost to the public.

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