Internet Security - Who's Secure? Are you?

The big question nowadays is how do you keep yourself safe on the internet.  Ten years ago it was a virus or a Trojan horse that could infect your computer.  Or a Macro from an excel file.  Then came the spam and pop up windows.  Everyone had to buy spam killer and pop up blockers.  As the defense against these attacks got better so didn’t the black hats that make them.  They came up with better ways to get inside your computer and they came up with ways to even use your computer as if it belonged to them with malware and botnets. 

What do all of these things have in common?  They can really only affect you if you do the wrong thing.  If you get an email from someone you don’t know, don’t open it, that’s what the spam filter is for.  If you do open it, for goodness sake don’t click on any hyperlinks.  Just saying this reminds me of when I was doing tech support for Sony computers at a company called Clientlogic.  A psychologist from New York City called.  He was getting the error, Operating System not found when booting up.  We booted to safe mode and looked at his partitions and nothing was there.  We couldn’t even find a C: drive.  I told him he was going to have to re-load the whole thing.  He started to yell at me.  He said he opened an email and all it said was “click the shiny red button” with a picture of a red button.  I asked him what he did and he said, “I clicked the red button of course”, and when I rebooted I got that error message.  This shows the point that you have to be careful with email.  If you don’t know who it is, don’t click it.  Another important thing this gentleman did not do.  He did not back up his data.  He had all of his client records on that computer.  This was in the late 1990’s so to get that data recovered was very pricy but that may have been his only choice.  I think I may have stumbled through 2 points at once but they are both examples of what you should do to protect yourself.

We found in this module that even that most protected person is not totally protected.  If a black hatter really wants to beat you up he will, he will know what the anti-virus companies have detected and he will adjust his program so you are not going to catch it.  He or she knows that eventually they will find a way to detect it and it will only make them work on another way to get to your computer.  When downloading music and movies were popular with sites like Napster and Kazaa there were many people getting snagged with a virus or worse.  You are downloading a song or a video that can easily have an executable attached to it.  Just hope it doesn’t say click the shiny red button when you open it.  It does show you that the black hatters do know what people want, at that time they wanted free music and movies, so may as well make the people pay for their free stuff.  I won’t even touch pornographic websites, as far as I’m concerned the people that troll those websites almost deserve to get their computer messed with.

So what did I learn to do to protect myself better in this module.  Not really too much as I like to think that I’m pretty safe.  When I shop online I really only use two means to shop.  I purchase a lot through Amazon and if I don’t use that I try to make sure the retailer uses Paypal for their transactions.  At least Paypal backs up what they do and that makes you at least think that they are looking at who they use for retailers because if they get too many complaints you would assume that they would stop using that retailer.

I did look at what I do with cookies.  I had mine set with no restrictions.  Plus every time I go to a website where I log in, I let windows remember my passwords.  While a lot of sites don’t allow this the ones that do, I go ahead and let them do it.   First what I did was go into internet options and under browsing history (Windows 7 system), I clicked delete files.  This lets you check the categories you want to clean out.  I do almost all of them but I am including cookies now.  Under the privacy setting I switched it to medium to try for a while.  This at least blocks some cookies. 

Other than that I stick to selectively reading emails from trusted senders, not opening strange attachments and using trusted sites, nothing “seedy”.  For anti-virus I just use Microsoft Security Essentials.  I find that it does just as good as a job as most other sites.  Here is link for a good review on this suite http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/software/utilities/anti-malware-software/microsoft-security-essentials-640587/review.

Below is link to an interesting message from Norton Anti-Virus.  It shows one of those worst case scenarios.  A malicious system intrusion that can be devastating to the user.  If you have ever had this one happen to you or know someone who did you know it’s not easy to get rid of.  The problem with these ones is that they usually get to you before a company like Norton knows how to stop it as I had mentioned earlier.  It is nice to see a company trying to scare you into buying their product though.  Who would have thought that for only $100 you can get the whole Norton suite of internet products to protect you from such a heinous thing but at the cost of using up most of your CPU’s resources!!!  (Can you tell I’m not a Norton fan?).

So to summarize, my line of defence is pretty basic for malicious security threats.  I use Microsoft Security Essentials and I have adjusted my internet option settings to limit the amount of cookies that are put in my cookie jar.  To show you some examples I downloaded the program Jing to do some screenshots of my internet security measures.  (I did accept the EULA without reading the whole thing, I hope there isn’t anything malicious in there either!!!). 

Here are the settings I use for the Microsoft Security Essentials.  I run it overnight on Sundays.  I prefer to run the full scan as it looks at more deep folders. 

Here is a shot at the change I made to my cookies on the privacy tab of Internet Options.

Another good thing to do is to make sure you are doing your windows updates.  Here is a shot of my update history, I have it set to automatically check for updates.

Going back to my days as tech support.  One of the tools I always tried was called the system restore feature of Windows.  You can get to it through System tools on your menu or if you are in real trouble but still can boot to safe mode.  If you can boot to safe mode with command prompt you can type in %systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe  and it should launch the restore.  You have to try everything before putting in those recovery CD’s.  Heres a picture of my system restore.  Not many restore points.  The trick is to try to remember when the problem first started happening and I always suggest trying to find a restore point about a week before the start.