Some Effective Defenses
Types of Defenses
For each type of malware (bad programs) there is a specific countermeasure:
- Antivirus Programs - remove viruses and/or prevent them from attacking your computer;
- Adware/Spyware Removal Tools - do exactly what their name says.
Nowadays these bad programs enter your computer mostly via the Internet; this is why you must protect the access to the Internet via a Firewall.
Antivirus Programs
There are plenty of antivirus programs available. Some of them are free and some others are not. The two free programs I recommend for personal use are:
Whatever is the program you select and install on your system please take note of the following:
- do not install and use more than one antivirus program at a time on your system;
- keep your antivirus program updated (both the application itself and its data - e.g. the virus lists).
Adware/Spyware Removal Tools
Also in this case there are plenty of adware/spyware removal tools available and also in this case some of them are free while some others are not.
Contrary to the antivirus programs, you can install and use on your system as many removal tools as you wish, and the more the better. The larger is the number of removal tools you use the larger is the set of malware programs you can remove from your computer.
While the antivirus program, once installed, allways runs on your system, with adware/spyware removal tool the responsibility of starting the tool, scanning your computer and removing the found malware is up to the user. It is recommended that the removal tools are runned/executed at least once a week.
Given that it is better to install and run more than one adware/spyware removal tool and given that the scan/check has to be performed at least once a week, this activity might constitute quite some burden on the end user. This is where a meta-tool like “Hitman Pro“comes to the rescue. Hitman Pro is a software tool that:
- automatically downloads from the Internet and installs the most famous adware/spyware removal tools;
- automatically keeps these tools updated;
- runs upon user request the various tools by providing them with the correct options and input commands;
- produces a summary/report of the scans and related recovery actions performed by the various tools.
Hitman Pro Configuration Panel
The above picture shows Hitman Pro’s configuration panel, where only free adware/spyware removal tools have been selected.
Firewall
Nowadays the two major operating systems, i.e. Windows (Windows XP) and Linux (e.g. Fedora Core), include a firewall in their standard distribution. The default configuration on these standard firewalls is good enough, i.e. there is nothing that you have to do to configure these firewalls.
In case you are anyhow curious about the nitti gritty details of Windows firewall and want to know how it works and how it can be configured, have a look at this Microsoft’s web page.