Tips for Protecting the Home Computer

The New York Times had some pretty good tips over the weekend for home users in regards to keeping their personal information safe. The tips actually were pretty good, but there was no explanation of why you would want to do each one. So, here go my explanations for the people who are interested:

• Don’t share your computer (on which you pay your bills) with your children (who download games)
  • This is more important than most people think. Lots and lots of advertising that goes on are focused toward kids these days. All one of the ads has to do is to catch the eye of a curious youngster and before you know it, you have a new toolbar installed in Internet Explorer! Also, lots and lots of kids games that come on CD also have ‘junk’ that gets installed – which has nothing to do with the game. What happens is a Yahoo, or someone will pay the game company to include their toolbar or other potentially unwanted program in the game’s installation program. Most of the time – it is very hard to bypass the unwanted software during installation. Anyway the thing that gets you in trouble here is spyware. I’ll give you a good example of how easy it is to get infected: My son comes home from school one day and went straight to the computer. Someone at school had introduced him to ‘cheat codes’ for his video games. These are typically sequences that are embedded into the game by the manufacture, which will allow you to get ‘extra’ stuff (like more lives, super duper powers, etc.) without having to achieve them by advancing through the game. Anyway, so one search on Google for Gameboy cheat codes and bam! The next site visited entices your child to click on a link for a free Gameboy game. Now, what just happened that you don’t realize is there is spyware now installed on your computer that will capture future information you send out with your computer. So, when you check your bank account later that night and supply your username and password – the ‘silent’ program has captured that information as it was being sent. With this valuable information in hand, it then sends it to the person who wrote the malicious spyware to begin with. Guess what, now someone can log into your bank account because they have your user/password information. Trust me, with separate computers this risk goes down drastically.
• Use a firewall program that warns you about outgoing connections that botnets make to communicate with control software.
  • Let’s say you were using that single computer with the entire family. One way to add a layer of protection is to make sure you have a firewall enabled on your computer. That way, even if the spyware program got installed while searching for Superman’s latest kryptonite antidote – the firewall would likely catch that program from sending your bank information that it captured later that night. Typically what would happen is a box would pop up anytime an ‘unknown’ program was trying to send information from your computer. By default, it would block the communication unless it was something you specifically told to allow through. Have the firewall enabled on every computer in the house.
• Don’t use the same password on more than one financial site.
  • Although financial sites tend to have a lot more security than your run of the mill website, they can still get hacked. So, if your financial userid/password credentials get stolen from one site – you don’t want the thief to start trying those same passwords on other financial sites you may have accounts with. I also want to add to this tip myself:
    • Don’t use the same password on every website that requires one. Let’s say you have a userid/password for eBay and that same password is used on your bank’s website. If that password is ever stolen, it would be fairly easy to find other sites you have used the same password with.
• Don’t let your browser store your password for such sites.
  • Most browsers offer to do this now, but you really don’t want to use this on any website that could be used without your permission. I’ll go so far as to say don’t let your browser save the password on any site that you have purchased things on. The reason for this is because most of the shopping sites will store your credit card information for future purchases. As handy as this may seem, all it takes is someone else to visit that site on your computer and they would be able to order Christmas for the next five years because the password had been saved in the browser.
• Don’t buy anything offered by a spammer.
  • Simply put, don’t click on anything in an email you receive unless you are 100% sure of where the email came from.
• Don’t click if someone offers you something too good to be true. It is
  • Very true. No matter how good something sounds – whether it came to you in an email or you saw it while browsing a website: 99.99 percent of it will come back to bite you if pursued.