Computer Security - Best Ways To Secure Your Computer
Technology has come so far in the past ten years. It is hard to even imagine that it was only within the last thirty years in our history that personal computers came into existence.
As I write this, we have become a society that runs on computers and everything is at our fingertips. The modern computer gives us access to a virtual world, filled with information and multimedia and we can almost do anything we want to using a computer.
Although this is such an exciting time for computer users, and the internet has never been more popular, we also have to keep in mind the question of how to keep our data safe from hackers and guard our computer security, especially where privacy is concerned.
Hackers may have started off with an “us against the machine” type of mentality and acted as a form of protest, but this is no longer the case. Most hackers now only want to wreak havok on unsuspecting computer users. Their primary purpose is to steal or destroy data.
The theft of personal information from one’s computer to use for financial gain is a common aim of the professional hacker. However, there are some hackers who simply want to destroy data from others’ computers for the fun of it, or who want to take control of a computer for the purposes of spamming, hacking or spreading viruses - usually without the owner’s knowledge.
What can we do then to protect ourselves from all these problems? The best protection against phishing, spam, viruses, trojans and spyware attacks are to have two software applications installed that are especially designed to fight off these intruders. One is a Firewall and the other is an AntiVirus program.
The first line of defence is a good Firewall, so named because it acts similar to a firewall in your car, which protects the car body and its passengers from the engine, in the event of a fire. The Firewall is a software program that, once set up, will give a layer of security between the computer and the internet.
The second line of defence and, really, equally important is the AntiVirus software. Today’s AntiVirus programs are made by internet security companies and this is all they do. They simply maintain vigilance over the newest viruses and trojans that are created daily by hackers, and they continually update their AntiVirus software to stop it from being run on a user’s computer, before any damage is done.
We can all do other things to stop ourselves from becoming the target of hackers, and the main way is by being aware and vigilant. We need to be careful about the emails we open and watch the kinds of websites we visit. Hackers are very clever people, who will prey on the fear we all have of losing our data, by offering their own brand of virus protection software, which contains viruses or is damaging.
The way a bank teller learns to differentiate counterfeit money from real money is by studying real money, so they can pick out a fake at forty paces. In the same way, We need to make sure we are informed about what the best practices are with our computer use, so we avoid making mistakes that could cost us our data. We need to learn and talk to people who are knowledgable about these things. If you do this, you will keep a step ahead of the hackers.
Tags: Software
