Protecting Your Computer:

Steps For Protecting Your Computer: So many people today use their computers for simply everything, from basic emails and communicating with friends to online shopping and banking. The more we do these things regularly – the more we open ourselves up to potential malicious computer hackers, attackers and crackers. While some of them could be trying to steal or “phish” your personal details and information so they can sell your identity, others might want to enlist your own computer and use it as a platform from which they can attack other unsuspecting targets.

It is important for your safety and that of your personal information, that you maintain a reasonably constant vigilance and make sure your computer is protected at all times. Theft of just your personal details can cause major nightmares if your identity is stolen and sold. It can affect absolutely everything in your life.

Steps For Protecting Your Computer

Here below, I have listed some cost effective and simple ways that you can make your computer a lot more secure, to help keep the hackers and computer viruses at bay:

1. Always make constant backups of your important information
2. Store your backups in a safe place – completely separate from your computer.
3. Update and patch your computer’s operating system, your web browser and your software regularly. If you use a Windows operating system, you can visit the site and run their online update wizard, which finds all of the latest patches you will need for a Windows computer. Also go to Office Updates and see if there are any patches required for your Microsoft Office programs.
4. Make sure that you have a firewall installed on your computer. Without a good firewall – viruses, malware, worms, Trojans as well as adware are all able to easily access your computer via the Internet. Consideration should be given to the benefits and differences between hardware and software based firewall programs.
5. Check over your browser settings and also your email program settings, and make sure they are set for optimum security. You should take these steps because Active-X and JavaScript are frequently used by hackers to plant malicious programs inside peoples home computers. While cookies are normally relatively harmless in terms of your computer security concerns, they do still track your movements wherever you go on the Internet and build a profile on your browsing habits. At a minimum, consider setting your security setting for the “Internet zone” to High and for your “trusted sites zone” to Medium Low.
6. Install anti-virus software.
7. Set your anti-virus software to get automatic updates so that you will always have the most up-to date version running and keeping your computer safe.
8. Never, ever open any unknown email attachments at all. Even if you recognize the email address, this is just not enough – because many computer viruses come from harvested email addresses and these may well be email addresses of people you know and trust.Many viruses are spread worldwide from a familiar address.
9. Never run programs from any unknown origins.
10. Do not send programs from any unknown origins to friends and coworkers simply because they contain funny or amusing stories or jokes. They may contain a Trojan or other virus waiting to infect a computer.
11. Disable hidden file name extensions. By default, the Windows operating system is set to “hide file extensions for known file types”. You should disable this option so you can view the file extensions display in Windows. Some file extensions will, by default, continue to remain hidden, but you are more likely to spot any unusual file extensions that do not belong inside your computer.
12. Always power down and turn off your computer and disconnect it from the network whenever it is not in use. Hackers will not be able to access and attack your computer whilst it is disconnected from a network or turned off.
13. It is prudent to make a boot disk or start-up disk just in case your computer is damaged or somehow compromised by a malicious program. Obviously, you would need to do this BEFORE you experience any hostile breach of your computer system.

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