Given the proliferation of the MyDoom, Blaster, Welchia and Dumaru worms, and the myriad other worms and Trojans which impact on your ability to surf the Net with some degree of safety — not to mention, the thousands of pieces of adware, spyware, malicious cookie and programme hijackers, and variants of each of these malware intrusions into your computer — if your computing experience is to be anything approaching satisfactory, you are going to have to protect yourself.
Read below to learn more about the minimum set of conditions for surfing the Net so as to protect yourself, and everyone else, on the information highway …
Installation of programmes in each category below represent necessary conditions to surf the Net safely. You will require …
1. An up-to-date AntiVirus programme, such as Norton AntiVirus, McAfee VirusScan, or the free and available AVG Anti-Virus. A manual virus scan should be run weekly with any one of these programmes, to catch viruses not detected while the programme ran in the background.
2. A firewall, such as ZoneAlarm or Sygate.
3. The anti-spyware programmes Spybot: Search and Destroy and Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware. Both of these programmes should be updated and run weekly, separately and in the order they appear here.
4. McAfee Stinger. You should run a full scan each week with the latest version of this free programme.
Further, weekly you should …
5. Visit the Windows Update site to download the latest security patches.
6. Conduct a regular defragmentation of your hard drive(s).
Implement each of these security strategies, religiously conduct a weekly maintenance of your computer, and all things being equal, you should save yourself harmless from the many malware intrusions which denigrate your Web surfing experience, and / or potentially damage your computer.
