Help Stefan CampaignIf you can spare $1 then help support this site and change someone's life forever? Learn how and why on the Help Stefan campaign page. Or donate $10 and get my guide to spices book as a gift for your donation! |
Building your PC:
Internet Security
We've already dealt with the problem of computer viruses as well as other threats to your machine such as spyware and adware. There are still a few other ways that your computer can come to harm and these will be dealt with in this section.
The advent of ADSL/Broadband has meant that many more computers are left on and connected to the internet all the time. This means that people can 'hack' into your computer using it to send fraudulent e-mails or setting-up 'phishing' sites using you as a temporary host. Then there is the problem of 'phishing' itself. How do you know that the site you're going to is legitimate? Finally there's the direct maintenance and security of your machine itself. After all your computer is a machine. It has a large number of software components that act in concert and problems can occur such as the corruption of your Registry or losing data due to a catastrophic failure of your hard drive.
With a little knowledge, some forethought and a little preparation, however, all the problems above can be solved.
Securing your PC: Firewalls
In computing terms a firewall is a piece of software that acts as a barrier between what are termed 'zones of trust'. Effectively, for a personal computer or a small home network the PC or the networks is a 'trusted' zone (after all, it is yours!) and the external internet is a completely untrusted zone. Without a firewall almost all the internet ports on your PC are available to anyone with a modicum of programming skill to 'hack' your machine. A successful hack means that someone has gained access to your machine. They can read your documents, use your e-mail applications to send mail to others or even use your machine as a host for a viral website. Unfortunately this type of crime is becoming more prevalent as the number of fake websites and hijacked URLs increase.
The only way to combat this type of crime is to install a personal firewall on your home system, especially on any PCs directly connected to the Internet. Most firewall software for the home PC are a combination of an 'application-layer firewall' that intercepts all traffic sent and received by a browser, FTP application or a Telnet application, intercepting and stopping and suspicious traffic. The 'network layer firewall' works at a lower level and scans all traffic coming into and out of your PC. A set of rules are defined and information is not allowed into your PC unless they match the rules. As such it is virtually impossible for anyone to gain unauthorized access to your PC and your home network.
Phishing
Phishing represent the latest set of measures that fraudsters use in an attempt at gaining sensitive personal information. In the dictionary Phishing is defined as:
(fish´ing) (n.) The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a Web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has. The Web site, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information. Phishing, also referred to as brand spoofing or carding, is a variation on ‘fishing’, the idea being that bait is thrown out with the hopes that while most will ignore the bait, some will be tempted into biting.
Phishing started out with the fraudsters indiscriminately sending-out e-mails purporting to originate from banks or on-line payment systems and asking users to log onto a website to verify their details. This way they would be able to get sensitive personal information and credit card details. Recently phishing attempts have begun to target specific customers of banks and on-line payment systems. These days phishers can even identify the bank that a certain user employs before targeting this directly. This directed activity is termed spear phishing.
Most phishing attempts use some kind of deception to lead users to believe that the URL they are being asked to click on is a legitimate URL of a bank or on-line services. This can include a simple mis-spelling of the URL, cloaking the actual URL behind an image, using a compound URL such as http://www.ebay.com@www.mydomain.org where, instead of being directed to ebay the URL actually directs the user to http://www.mydomain.org. More technically proficient phishers are using a bank or online service's own scripts against them. In this type of attack the user is actually initially logging-on to the service's own web pages so that both the web address and the security certificates appear correct. In this attack method (known as Cross Site Scripting) users may receive a message saying that they have to "verify" their account, by following a link to what appears to be an authentic website; in reality, the link is crafted to carry out this attack, although it is very difficult to spot without specialist knowledge.
The only way to stop phishers from being successful is to never access a bank or on-line service's website from an e-mail. You can also use software such as that advertised above to examine URLs and security certificates to verify that any site you're logging into is authentic.
Protecting your PC: Software
In the page on the registry I tell you how to look after that particular critical database of your Windows-based operating system. However, the very act of installing and removing software on your system or moving large files around can leave residue on your system. This programmatic detritus can accumulate, making your system become inefficient over time as your hard-drive fragments and you accumulate links to files that no longer exist.
As a result you should periodically de-fragment your hard drive and run an application that scans your system to look for damaged files, missing links and broken fonts. All things that can happen to your system over time making it function more inefficiently.
This could be categorized as maintenance of your system's general health.
Protecting your PC: Backups
You are performing periodic back-ups of your system and your critical data aren't you? Actually the chances are that you're not... Somehow most people seem to assume that the hardware of their computers will function flawlessly. But remember that you're storing your data onto a hard-drive. A magnetic disk that's spinning very fast indeed and which, as a result, can break. If your hard-drive breaks then all your data has been lost.
The problem is that this is just about the last thing most people think about... Until it's too late that is. Indeed, it's only after they've lost all your data once that people start making regular backups (I'll admit that's what happened). These days, however, with rewritable DVDs and automatic backup software available there really is no excuse for not backing-up and archiving your critical data. That way, if the worst does happen (and I fervently hope that it doesn't) then you will only have lost a few days' work rather than many years' worth of data.
By performing regular backups you're also potentially isolating yourself from the worst effects of a virus or worm attack. Say a new virus is written, one you have no protection for and your system becomes infected. You may have no option but to re-initialize your system and start from scratch. However, if you've been regularly backing-up your data you can recover everything you did prior to when the virus struck.
Again, much of what's written here is simply common sense. However, if you protect your system properly the worst-case scenario may never happen to you.
|
A quick and simple way to fix and optimize your Registry.
|