These days, it doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg to ensure your online security. The following list is a complete solution to keeping your PC and the data on it safe from harm. We’ve tried to pick out the best options in each area, so hopefully you’ll find something that works for you and at the very least you may consider a new approach to maintaining your web safety.
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Issue 271 game demo roundup!
Microsoft’s own virus protection (Microsoft Security Essentials) is perfectly capable and system resource friendly. Ideal for protecting low end budget systems, but your main multi-core rig packed with excess RAM is better off going down the third-party route for catching threats. Any additional system overhead will not be noticeable. As well as being sensible with what you click, it’s a no-brainer to install one of the myriad free antivirus solutions around. With a little research we’ve discovered that Avast Free Antivirus is currently the most potent free solution available, closely followed by stalwarts AVG Free AntiVirus and Avira AntiVir Personal. It’s your call which you prefer though…
avast! - You've tried the rest, now the get the best
As the name suggests, BufferZone Pro can give you a buffer zone against online threats. Anti-virus, firewall and anti-spam are all form of security that are the norm, but even they can sometimes miss certain attacks. BufferZone allows you to chat with IM, do your online banking without being exposed and potentially unprotected. Used with basic Anti-virus and Firewall software, Bufferzone can offer total protection.
If you have any type of desktop email service then you are at a greater risk of receiving spam. Compared to web-based mail services, such programs don’t usually have any effective spam filtering. Enter MailWasher Free. This app integrates with any email program, so after installation you know you will be spam-free, providing yet another level of protection from web-bourne threats.
This is a light-weight and intuitive firewall from web security giants Comodo that gets to work quickly, downlaoding and installing in a matter of a few minutes. It runs without draining your resources and quickly learns what your system wants to allow and deny, and although some people may find the notifications a little intrusive they can be customised not to appear. But after all, you want to know what you’re being protected from, right?
Not everyone is able to tell when a search result is fake, dangerous or even illegal – the snippets of what you see when using a search through Google, for instance, can be massaged to like like the real deal, you click it thinking it’s fine then BOOM! You’ve put your PC at risk from bad internet men. AVG Secure Search is a cross-browser add-on that rates your search results and alerts you to potential threats, unwanted behaviour and other security risk-factors.
Think of LastPass as a kind of benevolent hacker, that roots around in your Windows system and finds potentially ‘at-risk’ passwords then makes them safe. The browser add-on will encrypts locally (i.e. on your machine as opposed to over the network) meaning your information is completely secure from anyone or program eavesdropping on your network traffic. The usual form-filling and AES-256 encryption are present here, but with many more intricate features to ensure you are safe at all times.
The best place to start when looking to sure-up your online security is the very portal through which you access the web – your browser. Although there are now add-ons and plugins available for pretty much any browser that will give you added protection in some way or another, Google’s own Chrome is now widely accepted to be the safest browser for general use. It even includes it’s own sandbox (the feature that maintains separation between the browser and the OS, preventing attacks from hitting your system) which is seen as the most effective and consistently applied of any browser that contains such a feature. No wonder it’s so popular.
According to Malwarebytes, 97% of all online threats are attributable to so-called malware – this term encompasses almost anything that performs undesired actions on your computer. Fortunately, their Anti-Malware software is a powerful tool designed to prevent the infection of your machine in real-time. If you have already fallen foul of some dodgy warez, Malwarebytes is able to remove such undesirable and malicious objects. It is incredibly simple to use and very effective, using chameleon technology to, quarantine, infiltrate and rid infected systems of trojans, worms, rootkits, spyware and more.
Get a handle on malware before it can do any harm
One particularly sneaky way fraudsters steal your details is by deploying keyloggers. As the name suggests, they log your keystrokes during a web session, for instance, and record the results for Mr Big to use at his leisure. KeyScrambler, as the name suggests, scrambles your keystrokes at the keyboard driver and unscrambles them at the browser, keeping your details safe from view.
Spotflux serves up free internet encrypted anonymity for all! Once installed you simply click ‘Enable’ and few seconds later all your web traffic is directed through their servers. This is more than just a simple proxy to hide your identity though, SpotFlux intercepts malware and tracking cookies through cloud protection adding another important layer of protection. The trade off here is a slower internet. A quick test reduced our 28Mbps connection to just over 2Mbps. General web browsing isn’t terribly hit, but downloads and media streaming are slowed to a crawl.
Posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2012 at 10:05 am under Web Packs. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: security, stay safe online, web pack
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