Most of these spyware and adware won’t do any damage to your pc, but some of them will hog your pc resources and some of these malware can bring down your pc to a crawl, rendering it useless due to resource hogging.

By now you’ve know a little bit about all these Viruses and Malicious software (Malware), now I’m going to tell you how to protect your pc from these ‘no good for nothing’ software.

ANTIVIRUS

Antivirus software is a must on any pc running Microsoft Windows as an Operating System. Some of the common names in the Antivirus Industry are Norton Antivirus, Mcafee Viruscan, PC Cilin, AVG and the list goes on. Some are a freeware, but most are commercial software, meaning you have to pay for their license.

So there are a lot of antivirus software, but which one is the best? The one you want to use to protect your PC. This debate has been going on and on, and in the end, there is no answer. For us at Edubase, the answer is fairly simple; the best antivirus software is the one that is regularly updated.

It really doesn’t matter which Antivirus you use, as long as you keep their virus definition updated regularly, your pc will be safe from viruses.

FIREWALL

Firewall, simply speaking is software that monitors traffics between your pc and the internet, or network. The internet is a big network anyway. Nowadays, firewall software is a must, and not an option anymore.

Most of the soft firewall (firewall software) have the tendency to block or disallow any traffic or activity that is condemn to be malicious, for example a hack attempt by some digruntle hackers living thousand of miles away. Firewall can also hide your pc from any scan made by hackers; it will put all your port into ‘stealth’ mode thus making your pc appear to be offline, or invisible to the outside world.

Some of the soft firewall also come with what is call a ‘application policy’ , that is it can monitor programs and processes that is running on your pc, and give you the privileges either to allow or disallow the programs and processes, so unnecessary programs and processes can be block from running.

If your pc is connected to the Internet or Local Network most of the time, a software firewall is compulsory. Preventative Measure

Below are some of the preventive measure you should take to protect your pc from viruses and other malicious software.

Do not open any email attachment from unknown, suspicious or untrustworthy source, even if it is a picture of the sexiest lady available today, hell even if it’s from your best friend. Better to confirm that they really sent the email, as if better to be safe than sorry. Be very, very careful of file(s) you downloaded from the internet. Some of the website can run malicious code that can do harm to your pc even before you downloaded the files. Make sure to scan for viruses immediately after you save the file(s) to your pc. Beware of file(s) from stranger. So you meet a new friend on IRC/Yahoo Messenger/MSN. He/She seems quite nice, you chat a while, and he/she make you laugh. And now he wants to send a picture of him/her to you. You accept the file, you run the file, and he/she is quite good looking. What you didn’t know is, hidden in the file, is a trojans that is lurking in your background process just after you view the picture. So be very careful to accept files from stranger. Scan for viruses every removable media that is plug in into your pc, i.e, a floppy disk, thumb drive, flash card/memory etc. Most of this removable media is writable, meaning that a virus or malicious software can write themselves on the removable media, and easily infected any system when they’re plugged in.

These are some of the info that can make you become more aware of what is happening in the virtual world, with the Internet connecting millions of pc every second, and most of them running product from Microsoft, which is well known for its security issue, precautions and prevention is necessary.

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