How To Keep Your System Tighter Than Fort Knox

Miscreants lurk out there on the world wide web.  The moment a fully updated and well-patched copy of Windows XP connects to the net without a firewall it goes under attack. I verified this.  The other day, I revved up a laptop that had nothing but XP Pro on it and surfed the web. It had no virus scanner, no firewall, no rootkit detector. The system was naked as a newborn babe.

Thirty minutes of visiting random sites and the system went down. Hard. A post mortem revealed something ghastly. Over fifteen web bugs, viruses and malware infilitrated the windows core- from the browser down to the OS itself. That was bad. And to think it was fully patched. Unlike the Apple OS, Windows is vulnerable to attack without third party protection.

Do you run mission critical websites? If you do, keep it safe. Don’t only patch it up with windows updates, make sure you throw in strong protection that keeps the marauders at bay. Virus scanners are a first step, but they’re not enough The following keep your system iron clad:

• Eset Internet Security.  Eset keeps winning awards. Not only does it detect more malware than industry giants Norton and Mcafee, it is also light on resources and results in negligible false alarms. More importantly, it takes amazingly low disc space. I don’t understand why basic software like AV consume almost 100MB these days. They even justify the bloat by calling them Suites! Eset refused to tread this path and offers a comprehensive system just a few megabytes large. At full protection mode, Eset provides firewall, rootkit and virus protection. The user will notice no startup slowdowns or lag during application operations.  Games don’t stutter and video processing sails smoothly. In fact, the only thing the user will notice is the absolute lack of rogue viral software.
• Spybot Search and Destroy Eset affords solid virus protection but middling spyware and adware prevention. Dialers and porn hacks somehow circumvent Eset and install flashing ads that make me cringe at work or connect to sites that make the girlfriend throw the book at me.  For non viral malware, you need the best antispyware around. Now, you can opt for pricey spyware tools that miss many bugs, or you can install a free solution that affords near impregnable  shielding.  To date the only solution I find viable is Spybot. Sybot regularly upates and provides two modes of protection. The first is with an online TSR called a teatimer. It scans for adware like behaviour and blocks installation. The second is with browser innoculation. Adware tends to modify browser code to spam the user with ads. Spybot patches browser vulnerabilities and prevents integration. For instance, the well known alexa tool bar fails to install with the addition of Spybot.
• Threatfire Heuristics. A virus and antispyware system is only as good as its last update. Signature updates are indispensable since they let the software identify rogue code and facilitate its removal. Fail to update  and the system remains vulnerable to invasion. That gives rise to  many malware authors writing code that disable the update process. Crippled, the AV suite becomes impotent. Threatire resolves to mitigate the problem with a system that scans for malware and viral behaviour without the use of constantly updated signatures. You can let threatfire run without core upgrades for a few weeks and it will still catch rogue software- provided they attempt undesirable actions. I’ve tried threatfire standalone, meaning it remained the sole means of protection. It suprisingly kept 15 out of 17 intrusion attempts and did so without impacting system speed. That’s good batting average in my book.
• TrueCrypt Encryption. Imagine that all your viral, spyware, malware and heuristic protection were breached by a determined hacker. Do you still have hope of safeguarding your financial data? Yes, if you have truecrypt installed. Truecrypt creates a hidden container file on your drive that keeps the most important data you have. It’s hashed up in 256 bit soup and can be opened only with a password. Hence if the online hacker (or holdupper who steals the notebook) attempts entry, he faces a brickwall. Even an 8 core processor will take a hundred years attempting  to break the code!

What have you got on your system right now? Got financial data an confidential company reports? Then make sure you’re insured. Download the latest system protection today.

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