Protect Your PC - How to avoid those computer nasties

My Piece for Ebb and Flow Magazine - A Community Magazine for Hastings.

In an ideal world surfing the internet and using your PC would be a problem free experience; login, surf the net, read your email and download, and that's that! Alas that is not the case. And what is more, one of problems with the internet is that many people do just that, but more of that later on...

The unfortunate fact is that the internet is not a safe environment, the virtual world is full of virtual nasties only too eager to burrow their way into your machine and cause all sorts of problems. Viruses, Trojans, Keyloggers, Browser Exploits, Rootkits and other assorted uglies all damage your PC or worse still allow it to broadcast spam email and even private information to outsiders!

OK so that's the bad news, the good news is that there are lots of things you can do to ensure that your machine stays safe and sound while online. There isn't room in this article to do more than touch on the various methods of protection, but if you follow the precautions mentioned here you will insulate yourself against the vast majority of the nasties out there.

For those of your with children the likelihood of a something unpleasant finding its way onto your machine is even greater, downloading MP3 music or films from Peer to Peer (P2P) networks, like Kazza and Napster and Bit Torrent sites greatly increases the chance of something unwanted coming along for the ride. Its also worth bearing in mind that many sites that offer downloaded music and video are doing so illegally and while its unlikely that the police will come knocking on your door, you may want to take the view you are taking the bread from the starving mouths of various international music artists and that that's a bad thing.

I am going to start by assuming that you are connected to Broadband rather than still using a dial up connection and if that is the case than your first line of defence is a broadband router (see image on right of this page). This handy little device not only enables you to share your internet connection with multiple machines, but many come with wireless capabilities as well. Some Internet Service Providers try to fob off their customers with USB broadband modems – these are generally unreliable; require you to install their custom software on your machine and because they need the power of your computer's motherboard to work take up resources you may need for other programmes of your PC. A router not only comes with its own firewall, but will usually have controls such a MAC addressing and encryption which enable you to specify which machines can be used on my network, both useful tools in the fight against PC nastiness.

Your next line of defence is a software firewall and anti virus programme. The firewall is a back up for the one on your router or is your first line of defence if you are using dial up or a USB modem. Once installed it will ask you what programmes you want to allow access to the internet. This is always useful since an unknown programme trying to access the net could be your first sign that your machine has been compromised. Added to those I would always recommend a spyware detector and some kind of application to scan your PC''s registry all of which need to be run and updated regularly. Note: beware of online virus scans, especially those which claim to scan your PC's entire hard drive in a couple of seconds and then claim you have several hundred infections which only the scanner's owner can cure.

In addition if you are using MS Windows you will need to make sure you get the regular updates to your operating system, these come out sometimes weekly. Users of Windows XP and Windows 2000 will not be surprised to learn that the operating system has more holes than an old string vest and updating is essential. Make sure you have either set your system to automatically update or visit the update at least one a month. Users of olders systems such as Windows 98, and Windows ME will find that Microsoft no longer support their Operating System I am afraid. Consider updating to a more modern version or even dumping Microsoft entirely, see below.

Assuming your system is up to date, it is entirely possible to protect yourself for little or no cost. There are many good anti virus programmes which can be downloaded for free, amongst them Avast, AVG and Clamwin, all of which will stop viruses on your machine. However a router will set you back about £50 and paid for AV solutions can cost between £20 and £100. If this seems expensive consider the cost of replacing even the cheapest of PC or the cost of a repair which could be as much as £60 an hour. In addition failure to protect your machine could mean you become one of the several million 'zombie' computers out there unknowingly spewing out spam and porn emails to millions. Your only clue could be your machine grinding slowly to a stop.

As I said early, Microsoft products are more vulnerable than most to exploitation, so you may want to consider downloading an alternative internet browser something like Firefox or Opera for your day to day browsing needs. Similarly Outlook and Outlook Express have some weaknesses and Thunderbird is considered by many to be a better email client. You can find both at http://www.mozilla.org/

For those who want a completely secure internet experience I would suggest having a look at the various Linux Operating Systems, these are fully featured computer operating systems and the vast majority are http://free. www.linux.org

The above only scratches the surface of the problem and the possible solutions, readers who would like more information about how to avoid viruses and some of the handy tools out there can email me info@wanderjahre.co.uk

Happy (and safe) browsing folks

Ron Cook

About the author: Ron Cook is a self taught computer 'non-expert' who builds PC for a hobby. He has no practical qualifications in computer science but ten years of interest and practical experience, which he considers to be much better. On those rare occasions when his head is not inside a PC he can be found either reading, writing or walking.

And now ...the gallery

Linux and the Robert the Bruce approach.

Bit of a success out of failure tale here folks. Having made the move from Windows to Linux,I wanted to see what I could install a decent Linux distribution on.


Early attempts on a 486 did not fare well, although some helpful suggestions as to usage did come out of the discussion, so there something else for a rainy day.

I burnt a copy of PClinusOX for an install on a PIII with 512mb RAM and an old 20gb HDD along with a CD ROM and started the install, but something went wrong and the install stalled during format. I stupidly, as it turned out, killed the install process and tried again. This time nothing happened I concluded that I had broke the HDD in some fashion.

I piled the bits up in the corner and went for a coffee. Clearly I needed to reformat the disk, OK thinks I, lets see if Windows can help wit this one. Get my copy of XP and use it to format the disk, at worst I figure it will mean a dual XP and Linux boot and I can live with that.

Get XP running and it starts a reformat to NTFS. Six and a half hours later and 51% formatted it announces that it can't do that! I suppress a scream and think again. I still have an option to format to FAT on the XP disk, this has to be worth a shot and I recall from mm posts that Linux can read FAT, so out with the XP disk again and this time try FAT, lo and behold it works and really fast too.

I then tried to install Xandros, if this seems an odd choice I have had good experience of installing this distro when others have not wanted to know, Xandros installed withn no problems and I found to my delight that I had a working Linux distro. I played around with Xandros for a little while and liked the similarity with Windows but not enough to hang onto it for any time and it soon came off in favour of Ubuntu with KDE, my PClinuxOS CD could not be persuaded to install - another time maybe. Ubuntu installed on my newly regenerated disk with no problems.

The point (and there is one believe it or not) is that when I first tried Linux I would have stamped my foot at this and declared Linux a pile of cow poo and huffed my way back to Windows - which bizzarely is no less complicated. But some experience and a bit of luck 'n' work means that sitting in the living right now is a old machine perfectly capable of doing internet browsing and email and probably a fair bit more besides, I using it for this post.

Since it was built out of left overs it cost me nowt. I may add a DVD burner which I think is in the spares box and maybe an £11 wireless card if needed, could make a server with the addition of some more storage or just a back up machine if my main rig goes wrong. All good nothing bad and smiles all round.