Viruses, Spyware & Spam

The Holy Trinity: Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Firewall

Unfortunately, no computer is safe from attack these days. Even if you never surf the web, you can catch viruses from CDs and floppy disks. Consequently, we recommend three lines of defence:

Anti-Virus

We've all heard of virus attacks on large corporations and individuals and we probably know that we should protect ourselves particularly if we go on the internet. What we don't always know is who makes the best anti-virus product and why do we need to keep our virus databases constantly updated?
We come across many different AV programs every day and, in our opinion, the two biggest names (Norton and Mcafee) are not necessarily the best choice. All too often we find that these programs have been attacked by the very viruses they are trying to prevent or else they have slowed PCs down to a crawl.
Our advice is to try before you buy. An excellent free program is AVG available from Grisoft (please note, this is only free to home users). For those wanting that extra level of protection or wishing to purchase for business use, we recommend Kaspersky available here. This is the software that we have been using for the last three years and find it works impeccably.

Anti-Spyware

Much less well known than viruses, spyware, sometimes referred to as adware or malware, is, currently, even more of a menace! Designed to hijack your internet home page or hunt your hard drive for bank account details, this is truly scary stuff and you need to protect yourself immediately. The two big players are Spybot and Ad-Aware - either one is excellent but you may wish to download both for that extra level of protection (they're both free).

Firewall

A firewall is designed to prevent hackers from invading your PC and taking it over for their own purposes. We are all under attack but Broadband users need to be particularly vigilant. Experts recommend a combination of hardware and software protection. If you use a router to connect to the internet, you may already have this hardware protection. If so, it is a good idea to ensure that your Windows XP Firewall is also enabled. If you use an earlier version of Windows, check out Zone Alarm which is free for home use.

and now for something completely different...

Spam

Named after the famous Monty Python sketch, Spam has come to symbolise "junk" e-mail. Whilst it is virtually impossible to stop the creation of Spam, it is possible to prevent it bothering you. In the first few heady days after you have told everyone of your new e-mail address, any mail that you receive tends to be welcomed wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, a high percentage will probably be from direct marketing organisations and, sadly, much of it is of a highly offensive nature. You will very quickly come to realise that the Internet is a wonderful resource but that it can be very easily used by unscrupulous people to ply their wares at your expense.

Clearly, most sane minded people will want to filter out this invasion of privacy not only to protect children but also because it is costing YOU money. Unlike junk mail which comes through your letterbox, the e-mail variety has been "posted" at very little cost to the sender. It is the recipient and their Internet Service Provider who end up having to pay for the delivery! Apart from that, Spam is tending to clog up the World Wide Web so anything we can do to reduce it has to be a good thing.

The solution that we favour is called Mailwasher Pro from Firetrust.com. It very cleverly positions itself between you and the Internet and shows you what e-mails are sitting in your "in-box". At this point you decide whether to allow them in, delete them or bounce them. Deleting means that you don't wish to keep this particular message but are happy to receive similar ones from that sender in the future whereas bouncing is like the old Elvis song "Return To Sender -Address Unknown". The sender assumes that your e-mail address does not exist and stops sending. Simple and elegant!

We have been using it since we first came across it in 2002 and can verify that it really works.

Read more and sign up for this service by clicking on the link below.