This page exists specifically to provide a few security tips and recommend some reliable (and mostly free) tools for windows users to help keep your PC safe from hackers, viruses, malware and other nasty things. You can run through the page manually, or go directly to each specific topic via the following contents menu.
- spyware, adware and malware »
- browsers »
- antivirus utilities »
- firewalls »
- test your security »
- email security »
- confidential files »
- other utilities »
- general tips »
Last update: September 2009.
For the record, I am currently using Norton Internet Security 2009, a paid security package which includes antivirus, spyware protection, firewall and much more. Although previous versions of Norton ISS had received a lot of flak about hogging system resources etc., Norton seem to have resolved all their previous issues in the 2009 version. It is basically a very unobtrusive install-and-forget system that is specifically designed to be effective while making as little impact as possible on your computer use by utilizing resources only when in low demand. If you're looking for a paid security system, I strongly recommend it (I use it on MS Windows 64-bit Vista Home Premium), however if you are looking for free alternatives, read on.
What is spyware? Basically, it's software that covertly gathers user information through the user's internet connection without his or her knowledge, usually for advertising purposes. Spyware can also gather information about e-mail addresses and even passwords and credit card numbers. Aside from the questions of ethics and privacy, spyware also uses up the computer's memory resources and eats bandwidth as it sends information back to the spyware's home base via the internet, and hence can lead to slow processing speeds of legitimate software on your PC, adversely affect internet connection speeds, and cause system crashes and/or general system instability. Because spyware exists as independent executable programs, they have the ability to monitor keystrokes, scan files on your hard drive, snoop other applications such as chat programs or word processors, install additional spyware programs, read cookies and change the default home page on your browser among other things, constantly relaying this information back to the spyware author who can use it for advertising/marketing purposes, sell the information to another party, or even use it fraudulently or in some cases maliciously. In short, you really want to keep this crap off your PC.
What is adware? In many cases it's a legitimate revenue source for companies who offer their software free to users, however the effects are similar to spyware in that system responsiveness can be adversely effected. Many software publishers may offer a 'free' version of their software in sponsored mode, which means the software will display an ad window in the program as well as sponsored toolbar links. Others may install an entirely separate advertising system onto your computer that runs all the time, whether you're using the software it came with or not. An indication of adware like this on your PC is if you start getting popup ads even though you're not connected to the internet. The main difference between spyware and adware is that adware supposedly doesn't track what you do online or provide information about you to a third party.
What is malware? The word 'malware' is short for malicious software, software designed specifically to damage or disrupt a system, for example a virus or a trojan (a destructive program that masquerades as a benign application). Often these will also provide a backdoor for hackers to access your PC and take whatever information they want, including providing the ability to take control of your PC altogether and set you up as a proxy server, propagate infection to other computers, or even wipe the hard drive completely. Definitely not a good thing.
There are many tools available that claim to protect your PC from malware/spyware/adware, but unfortunately a large number of them are sources of malware themselves, so you need to be careful before downloading and installing just any random utility. There are two tools in particular I recommend to help combat this crap: Ad-Aware (not to be confused with 'Ada-Ware', a rip-off and allegedly fraudulent piece of crap), and SpyBot. Both are free general-purpose tools (or have free versions for non-commercial use) designed to scan for and remove a wide variety of malicious software (including spyware, adware, dialers, and other garbage). They are both reliable products which can co-exist on a computer without issue - indeed sometimes, when one tool fails to remove all the malware on a system, the other tool will finish the job. Click the logos below to go to the respective download pages.
Note that when running either tool, it is essential that they be updated regularly to include the latest patches and definitions - much like anti-virus software, these tools can only scan for malware that they know how to identify. Additionally, don't depend on one single anti-virus application to protect you from everything out there - the adage "safety in numbers" is particularly true here.
Of course as malware evolves, new tools to combat it will also become available, however Ad-Aware and Spybot have continued to evolve and keep up with the play over the last few years, and have thus continued to remain as a couple of the top utilities available in this arena.
[top]A good way to avoid many of the problems with malware or various internet-based malicious scripts is to use a secure browser. I recommend Mozilla Firefox as one of the safer browsers available. Yes, it is free. You can download it by clicking on the following graphic.
If you currently use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (which many people do), I recommend you use it as infrequently as possible and switch to an alternative browser that doesn't support auto-installs of malicious software and other exploits. Of course, IE being the most commonly-user browser also makes it the biggest target for hackers.
[top]Most new computers come with some form of virus scanner installed already, however these scanners are usually not free and only have a limited term on your computer before you'll need to re-subscribe by giving them more money. There are a number of good online virus scanners, but online scanners do not actively protect you from viruses 24/7, all they do is identify viruses once you've already caught them. While that is useful, it may also be too late - the damage may have been done by that stage. What you need is a virus scanner that runs 24/7 and monitors everything that comes in to your computer before it has a chance to do irreparable harm.
A popular free virus tool that you can download and run on your computer for full-time protection is Grisoft's AVG anti-virus. They provide the free version for non-commercial use which does a great job watching for viruses, trojans and other internet-borne nasties that may compromise your computer. AVG runs 24/7 and scans incoming email as well as your internet activity.
As with the malware tools, it is essential that your virus definitions database be updated regularly to keep your scanner effective. Fortunately you can set AVG to automatically check for and download updates on a regular basis.
As with malware tools, there's safety in numbers; while having AVG (or whatever anti-virus tool you decide to use) running 24/7 is great, it does not hurt to run a scan on your computer from time to time using a different utility which may catch something your regular scanner missed. Fortunately there are a number of quality online scanners that are free to use. Again, do not rely on the 'protection' of online scanners alone - they only check to see if you've already caught a virus (basically they are treatment, not prevention).
One of the more respected free online scanners is Trend Micro's 'HouseCall' service. Running it involves a temporary download which may take a few minutes depending on your connection speed. The scan itself can take a while depending on the speed of your computer processor and amount of data on your hard drive. If HouseCall identifies any problems, it will attempt to remove them or else give you a link to download an additional specific removal tool. Another reliable scanner is Symantec's security check. Ironically, many of these online scanners require Internet Explorer to be able to run because they need the activeX controls in IE, which FireFox does not have by default because of the higher security risk inherent in activeX.
[top]Much like a physical firewall prevents the spread of fire between two physical locations, the software firewall prevents the spread of unauthorized data between users inside and outside a network. Firewalls can also provide network address translation, so the IP addresses of computers inside the firewall stay hidden from view (which basically means if some hacker is looking for a computer to get into by scanning ports, they won't see yours).
Firewalls are an absolute necessity. A firewall will (or at least should) run on your computer 24/7, and is effectively the first line of defense designed to prevent unauthorized access. It also can block outgoing connections such as autodialers or trojans that have made it onto your computer already one way or another. As with virus tools, many new computers will have some form of firewall installed already. Some operating systems such as Windows XP and beyond have a built-in firewall, however those are not nearly secure enough in my opinion, although I believe they are improving (from what I hear of the Windows 7 inbuilt firewall). Be aware that if you connect the internet via a router, many have a firewall of some sort incorporated into the hardware, which may be adequate for some users.
There are a large number of suppliers of firewall software, some more reliable than others, and you'll often find they bundle firewall software with virus tools - Norton Internet Security 2009 is a good example of a provider that can supply all-in-one bundled security packages (at a price).
I used to recommend ZoneAlarm as a reliable and free firewall for non-commercial use, however, in February 2007, ZoneAlarm released a version update (version 7.0.337.000) which was a bit of a disaster, to put it mildly. Many users had major issues with it, apparent from the flood of complaints on the ZA forums at the time, which unfortunately went unanswered by ZoneLabs. The last release available for download prior to everything turning to custard is version 6.5.737.000, which you can still download from oldversion.com if you want to try it. I have never gone back to ZoneAlarm - the lack of any help whatsoever after that SNAFU was enough to drive me away for good, however if you want to see if they've made good more recently, feel free to check them out:
Another free firewall that has been recommended to me is Comodo, although I have not used it personally. I am also aware that Lavasoft (the makers of Ad-Aware mentioned earlier on this page) have also released a firewall based on the old Outpost Pro firewall engine, a respected product. The Lavasoft firewall is not free, but I thought it worth mentioning as their Adaware program is so effective.
[top]A good way to test how secure your computer is at present is to run it through a few security tests provided by trusted websites. Symantec provide an online security scan that will let you know if and where your computer is at risk.
Click on the image above to scan your computer. It will ask you to confirm a download to complete the scan - click 'yes'. The scanner will check for hacker exposure, windows vulnerability, trojan vulnerability, and even an antivirus product check. Ideally most of your ports should report as being in stealth mode, which means your computer doesn't respond to port probes and you are virtually invisible to hackers scanning the internet for potential targets. If the scan finds risks such as open ports, it will provide advice on what to do to reduce your security risk. Please note that because of certain activeX controls, this utility may need to be run from an IE browser.
Another service I have found very useful for testing open ports is the Gibson Research Corporation's ShieldsUp service. If you follow that link, click the 'proceed' button about half way down the page and you'll reach a page where you can scan just common ports or all service ports, as well as a few other tests. A similar service is provided by HackerWatch.org's port scan probe service, although it's not as in-depth as some of the ShieldsUp tests.
[top]Be careful who you give your email address to. When registering for services or info, check to see if the website has a no-spam policy in place and guarantees not to share your information with other companies. Once you get on a spam list, it can be virtually impossible to get yourself removed. It is well known that many of the 'remove me' links on spam emails (if they bother to even provide one) will get you removed from that particular list but added to 10 others instead.
Many email hosts or email applications include spam filters, so much of the spam never makes it to your inbox. Most people are happy with relying on that, I however have a distinct distrust of most spam filters. This is a result of having a bunch of job application replies getting trashed without my knowledge when I was using Hotmail and later Lycos as my email service provider. One utility I can recommend that has worked successfully for me is MailWasher. There used to be a free version available, although it would only handle one single email account, although I see they now offer a free 30-day trial version if you want to take it for a drive. The paid version, MailWasher Pro, will handle multiple email accounts for a one-off lifetime fee (which includes future upgrades). This utility is used in conjunction with an email client based on your PC, so if you only use online email, then this utility is of no use to you.
What MailWasher Pro does is it downloads your email headers and a portion of the content before it hits your inbox. Through an internal learning process, it will indicate spam emails or emails containing possible virus attachments and give you the option to delete them from your email server before they arrive on your computer and infect you (it can be set to do this automatically, or you can view them manually before being processed). The other thing it can do (which kind of appealed to me) is that it can 'bounce' the unwanted emails. What that means is that it sends a dummy server response back to the sender giving them notice that the email address they spammed does not exist. It took a little while for this to start having a significant effect on the amount of spam email I was getting, but a couple of months down the line I only get a small handful of spam per day (if any) compared to the several hundred I was getting every single day at one stage. More importantly, I don't have legitimate emails being denied because of over-zealous email filters. It's great. If you're looking for a solution, this is well worth the paltry US$39.95 one-off lifetime fee.
Having a secure email client is also a necessity. Again there are numerous clients available, the more common ones being MS Outlook and Outlook Express since they usually come bundled with MS Windows operating systems or MS Office. Mozilla provide a very secure stand-alone email client named Thunderbird which has a number of features making it very desirable - I certainly recommend it.
Click the logo above to get Mozilla's Thunderbird email client - it's free!
[top]A couple of other tools that may be of use are 'file shredders' and 'clean-up' utilities. When you put an item in your trash, it doesn't actually permanently delete the item, all it effectively does is remove any file paths to the item and drop it into the 'free space' of your hard drive, but it can still be recovered using specialized software. While this is not really an issue in most cases, if you have sensitive documents, passwords, bank account numbers, personal letters, commercially sensitive business documents etc, you don't want some clever person or online hacker getting into your computer and recovering those files. This is particularly true if you are selling or upgrading your existing computer.
What file shredders do is overwrite any documents before sending them to the trash. Clean-up utilities effectively do the same thing, but they overwrite documents that have already been trashed (basically they overwrite the entire 'free space' on your hard drive). Again there are a heap of free utilities available on the net that do this, but many of them are sources of malware or trojans. Gregory Braun has written a number of handy utilities, including file shredder and clean-up utilities.
Both of these utilities have 30-day free trial period, after which point you'd need to register them (pay for them). Both utilities have two file wiping methods available, the first being a standard two-pass file clearing procedure, the other being an NSA approved seven-pass file erasure method. For normal file deletion operations the two-pass method should be sufficient, but if you want to thoroughly erase a file's content before deleting it, use the NSA approved method.
[top]I hear of users experiencing the BSOD (blue screen of death) on a weekly basis, which I find horrifying. There are numerous other utilities available to help keep your PC running smoothly and efficiently, some legitimate, some not so much, so I'll recommend a few I use or have used in the past which appear to be pretty good at what they do. As an indication of what keeping your system 'tuned' can do, in the last few years I have experienced the BSOD only once unexpectedly, and that was a result of beta software release I was trialing. The expected occasions were when I was overclocking.
Disk fragmentation is one issue that can impact system speed significantly, leading to system slowdowns, PC crashes, slow startups and slow shutdowns. When you delete files or folders, the empty spaces left behind are filled in randomly as you store new ones. This is how fragmentation occurs. The more fragmented the volume is, the slower the computer's file input and output performance will be. MS Windows XP has a built-in disk defragmenter (as does many earlier versions of Windows), however it is notoriously slow. MS Windows Vista also has a built-in defragmenter, however that one doesn't even have a progress bar, so you have no idea if you have hours to wait or just minutes (extremely bad interface, in my opinion). Auslogics.com provides a very good disk defragmenter which completes the task of optimizing your hard disk much quicker than the default Windows defragmenters - and it's free. Click the 'disk defrag' image below to download.
The registry is very much like hard disk drives. Programs on your computer access the registry thousands of times per second, which means that the registry, just like disk drives, gets bloated and fragmented with time. Few are aware that the registry is fully kept in the memory when your PC is running, and since memory on your PC is much smaller than disk space, clearly the more bloated the registry becomes, the less space there is for other programs to run, which is at least part of the reason why Windows Vista or XP runs noticeably slower after a few months of work. Keeping the registry as compact as possible therefore means better computer performance, and AusLogics provides a registry defragmenter for that purpose - and it's also free. Click the 'registry defrag' image above to download.
Another utility I've found very useful is CCleaner, a system optimization and privacy tool which removes unused files from your system (allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up hard disk space), cleans traces of your online activities such as your browser history, cleans other records of commonly-used software such as Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Adobe Photoshop and more. It's very fast, contains no spyware or adware, and it's free! The name CCleaner refers to the C-drive being cleaned. Get to the download page by clicking on the following image:
There's a couple of other utilities you may wish to try. Startup Control Panel is a nifty control panel applet that allows you to easily configure which programs run when your computer starts. It's simple to use, is very small, and won't burden your system. A valuable tool for system administrators, Startup Control Panel is compatible with all modern versions of Windows through Windows XP. Windows Vista finally has a very good startup manager built-in - go to Control Panel > Performance Information and Tools, and then click on Manage Startup Programs on the left.
MRU-Blaster is a somewhat dated but still effective program made to do one task - detect and clean MRU (most recently used) lists on your computer. These MRU lists contain information such as the names and/or locations of the last files you have accessed. They are located throughout your registry, and for almost any file type. By looking at these MRU lists, someone could determine what files you opened/saved/looked at, what their file names were, and much more. Basically MRU-Blaster enhances the protection of your privacy, which is particularly important on shared computers.
Another handy utility is XP-AntiSpy, which is for use with MS Windows XP. Despite the name, it is not a spyware utility, but a very handy utility that lets you amend XP default behaviors for many components of XP, such as stopping Windows Media Player from acquiring licenses automatically, sending info about player usage, disabling Windows error reporting, turning off remote desktop support, disabling the messaging service and much, much more. Basically it's a Windows XP tweaking tool.
Although most operating systems have a system [time] clock synchronizing utility built in, the Atomic Clock Sync utility allows you to optimize how often Windows references an atomic clock server, and will synch your system clock accordingly.
[top]Using all the tools above should help you maintain a reasonably risk-free environment, but nothing is fool proof. As already mentioned, it is vital that you keep these applications up to date by regularly checking for new virus definitions etc or application upgrades. The applications will provide you with the information on how to keep up to date.
There are a few other simple things you can remember to keep yourself relatively free from attacks, spam or other similarly unwanted nasties. The first thing to remember is that if a site is offering you something for free that you weren't specifically looking for, there's probably a reason. Be very wary of clicking 'ok' to any download or auto-install prompts, particularly from websites that aren't well known.
Last but not least, if you're a Microsoft Windows user, check regularly for updates on the Microsoft Update website.
That about covers it.
