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Welcome To. Actually Useful stuff!. Getting To Know Your Website!. What Do I Consider Useful?. Internet safety Backup of critical information Care of your computer. Internet Safety.
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Welcome To Actually Useful stuff! Getting To Know Your Website!
What Do I Consider Useful? • Internet safety • Backup of critical information • Care of your computer
Internet Safety To give an understanding of internet safety I will point out some basic internet dangers and then give you some advice on how to combat these problems.
Malware! Malware, a term which is short for malicious software, covers a lot of categories and all of them are meant to do you and/or your system harm or steal information.
Categories of Malware • Virus • Spyware • Scareware • Trojan Horse • Worm
Virus A virus is generally designed to do harm to your system. A virus will usually attach itself to executable files and have a file extension of .exe. A virus is technically the most dangerous thing for your system but becoming secondary to spyware and scareware. A virus attack is usually for bragging rites among hackers and kids learning code, thus they are becoming less prevalent than the programs made to make money off of you or your organization.
Scareware Scareware is, to most of my customers, the most annoying of the items in the malware category. It not only takes your computer hostage promising that if you buy their product it will fix the myriad of problems you are experiencing, the scareware actually made or made up the problems. If you are daft enough to actually give these people your bank account information, they will have that hostage as well. If that is not enough of a slap in the face, buying the software never changes or fixes the state of your system and your computer will need professional service to put it back to normal. Generally speaking the only way I have found to successfully remove all traces of these attacks is a full wipe of the hard drive and a reinstall of the operating system.
Spyware Spyware is by far the most lucrative way for hackers to make money. Spyware is meant to not be noticed while it is on your computer since it is gathering information about you and sending it back to the writer of the code or it is redirecting all of your traffic through toolbars and browser hijacks. The best of these can get all of your information and you wont even know you’ve been hacked. I would be willing to bet almost half of the computers here have some kind of spyware on them right now.
Trojan Horse A Trojan horse installs a backdoor which allows hackers to totally takeover your computer. Your computer will become unknowingly part of a denial of service attack or used to send thousands of spam emails. Technically a virus, a Trojan horse will generally try to not be noticed so will not usually do any damage to your computer or make it run unusually. The FBI recently had to give 6 months warning before shutting down an operation that had control of tens of thousands of computers to use for their own nefarious ends.
Worm A worm is also a virus that will generally be a Trojan horse but is designed to spread itself to all the other computers on a user or company's network.
Identity Theft Although not malware, things you do on social networks like Facebook and other social sites, can give criminals most of the information they need to commit identity fraud.
What Can I Do? It is actually very easy and very cheap to be internet savvy and to protect yourself and your data.
Antivirus You do not need to spend a ton of money on an antivirus. Most free antivirus programs are quite adequate for blocking everyday virus attacks. An expensive antivirus can only give you a minimum of extra antivirus protection. The main thing to remember is no matter how much you pay for an antivirus if you are on a site the first day a new virus is out, you are going to get it since none of the programs will have the virus definition updated for up to ten hours after a new virus hits the internet. Also most of the mainstream antivirus programs like McAfee or Norton have become bloated system hogs that are dreadfully complicated for most people to understand and run. With that said a good antivirus program will keep you safe from most all known viruses, Trojan horses and worms. Last on the subject of viruses, pay attention to what you are clicking on, most viruses have to be executed.
Spyware There are some very good spyware programs and I recommend using them for spyware scanning. Most spyware is not technically a virus and it will not register on an antivirus program. Remember this is the category that makes hackers the most money so by its very nature it attracts the best programmers. Run your preferred spyware program regularly and make sure it is updated before you run it.
Scareware Scareware is the biggest pain in the but of all of the categories. It will usually pop up in a window that looks like its part of your system telling you you have to update, or restart, or any mundane computer operation that you have done a hundred times. Since it is made to look and act like your system, it is almost impossible for the average user to know they have just infected their computer. The program will give you a myriad of warnings in the jist of “your pc has registry errors, viruses, etc.”, and the only way to fix this is to buy “X” program. The program will have a name like “Antivirus 2013” or “Windows antivirus”. If you are getting this message you are already infected. No programs will tell you this is an issue until it is too late. Your only protection against this kind of attack is your wits. Pay very good attention to anything you click on while you are on the internet!
Identity Theft Safely following the simple advice I have given so far is a great first step in assuring you will not get your identity stolen. There are also steps to take to make sure your information is not easily accessible to thieves while you use social media such as facebook, twitter and various instant message services.
Personal Information Never post your personal information publically. Most social sites or messaging sites ask you to post things like name, age, where you live, work, etc...this is not a requirement and it is best to use generalizations Like first name only. The more information you put out about yourself the easier you make it for identity thieves.
Instant Messaging When using instant message services do not accept incoming file requests from people you do not know and make sure if you do accept one you are actually talking to whom you think you are. A good hacker may be in control of a friends computer.
Laptops/Tablets If you have a laptop that you frequently use on public networks make sure you have the file sharing option turned off. If your are using your laptop on a public network and it starts behaving abnormally, disconnect immediately and give your computer a scan for attempted intrusions. A good hacker will get right by most firewalls quickly and easily so this is an area I leave up to the individual. In my experience the added hassle of not being able to easily connect to networks is not worth the minimal protection of hardcore firewalls. So if you use a lot of public networks a firewall will add to your safety at the expense of being more difficult to setup and use, but nothing will keep you safer than being aware.
Personal Files Personal files that have sensitive information should be kept on a detachable thumb drive or hard drive. You can also encrypt your files but the first time you encrypt a folder or file, you should back up your encryption certificate. If your certificate and key are lost or damaged and you do not have a backup, you won't be able to use the files that you have encrypted.
Backup Backing up your personal data is not very difficult. It may take some time to setup but once your setup for backups doing them regularly should be easy.
Carbonite Not to sound like a commercial, but of all the computer services that companies want you to pay for this is one that is worth every penny. If you have Carbonite your backup is already done and you need not pay attention to this next bit.
Organize Before setting up a backup, identify the files that you want backed up and try to get them all into a central location, such as, a specially named folder or your documents folder. All address book and email programs will have an import/export feature that will give you a backup file of everything currently in your contacts and email
Do It! Once you have taken the time to identify what files are important to you and have organized them in a central location, back them up! Invest in a backup device such as a thumb drive, external hard drive or dependable cloud space such as charter cloud drive and use it!
Care Care for your computer with regular maintenance. Depending on the amount you use your computer, at intervals of one week to once a month you should run a virus scan, spyware scan and empty your temporary files. Blow dust out of the case and off of the fans regularly as well. Listen for telltale signs of eminent failure like a fan that is becoming very noisy, a cd/dvd rom drive that is leaving marks on disks or spinning very loud, or even a hard drive that is starting to sound like it is grinding coffee. Replace mice and keyboards as needed, they are cheap and cause more computer headaches than you would think if not operating properly. As with anything mechanical maintenance will usually keep things running smooth.
Extra Tips from Tim A few everyday things to help you keep your computer running lean.
Be Patient! Even todays fastest computers still need time to load. Especially when first booting, a computer should be given time to fully load before using it. Some programs will require a few seconds before they are ready to use as well. Watch your hard drive activity indicator, when it has stopped or slowed to almost nothing you should be good.
Stop Clicking! When a computer is responding slowly, clicking things will only make it slower! A computer, no matter how new or how fast, is still at its core, a First In First Out adding machine. No matter how many new commands you give a computer it is still going to finish the first thing in the stack.
Memory is Finite Computers are being made with more and more memory but a computer still runs best with as few things running in memory as you need. Your system tray is a good indicator of what is running on your system.
What Can I do? Almost everything you install today will have some extra programs attached to it that you do not need to install. This could be your camera, your mp3 player, your Garmin or Tom Tom. Be aware as you are installing required software for new devices of these extras they try to install. These extras will include resetting your homepage, a toolbar for internet explorer, or a trial of an antivirus program. Where one or two extra programs running will not hurt system speeds as you install more things performance will suffer until your system is running terribly slow.
That’s A lot! We have covered a lot of ground that may or may not be easy for you to understand. I want to give a few live examples of the things I am talking about then I am going to open to floor to your questions.
Extra Links http://www.malwarebytes.org/ http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage http://www.carbonite.com/en/v2/index http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner These are just a few helpful links feel free to contact me at Ulysses13@charter.net or 231-577-1090 if you have any questions or would like help with anything Thanks, Tim.
