Anti-virus and Spy ware Controls

Surfing and Emailing Safely: 07/03/08
The Internet and the World Wide Web offer a world of information at your finger tips. Instant information and communication is available to any one, but it comes with a cost. In order to make the Web available to everyone, it is available to some who use it for bad purposes. There are people who steal personal information, spy on what you look at on the Web and use your link to the Web to get into your computer. It is like the doorway to your home, you need the door open to see the world, but the door that lets you out also lets others in. That is why you have a lock on your front door. Today we will show how to put a lock on your computer's front door.
There are three types of attacks to stop.
Viruses: Small programs that are put in your computer to damage it, collect and transmit information without your knowledge and use your computer to infect other computers.
Spy Ware: Small programs that monitor your usage and transmit the information to gather information for advertisers.
Direct Attack: Random searches for unprotected computers to see if a computer is open to attack or available to use for information using “Pinging”.
There are three types of protection available.
1. Anti – Virus: A program that checks your computer for infections and checks email for infections.
2. Anti – Spyware: A program that checks your computer for spyware programs that could be used to transmit information.
3: Fire Walls: A programs that acts as butler at your door and asks you if you want a program to run on your computer and shuts out those that you don't want to enter.
Free programs are available for home use to protect your computer. The companies that supply these programs are the same companies that protect Large Corporate networks and they have found that a great number of infections and problems come from employees home computers that are not protected. By protecting these home computers they save money fixing Corporate Networks.
There are two highly recommended Anti – virus programs, AVG and AVAST. Although they do not offer phone support like the paid programs, they do have excellent user support and regular updates to ward off new attacks.
AVG is available at: http://free.avg.com/
There is an excellent tutorial for using AVG at: http://www.top-windows-tutorials.com/free-avg.html
It shows a step by step video of how to run the program and the features.
Avast is available at: http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html
There are several Anti – Spyware programs and two of the best are Spybot and AdAware. Be aware there is a bad program called “Adware” which is spyware. Like the free anti – virus programs they have support groups and updates.
Spybot is available at:
http://www.download.com/Spybot-Search-Destroy/3000-8022_4-10122137.html
AdAware is available at: http://lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php
A very good free fire wall is Zone Alarm. MicroSoft Windows XP includes a weaker version as part of the Windows XP program. If you are going to use Zone Alarm on a Windows XP computer you must turn off the Windows fire wall. You can only have one fire wall on a system. I recommend that you use Zone Alarm available at:
http://www.download.com/ZoneAlarm-Firewall-Windows-2000-XP-/3000-10435_4-10039884.html