How To Protect your system!

Nowadays, many people access the internet without having any idea about the dangers the computer must face. Yes, I said dangers! Your operating system is vulnerable to the multitude of viruses, spywares, trojans!
Experts claim that by the end of 2009 there will be about 1 billion viruses/malware programs
There are many types of malware (by the way, malware comes from Malicious Software):

Viruses – A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without the user’s permission or knowledge, because it attaches itself to a harmless program.It can also be sent as an attachment to an email message, the virus then emails itself to dozens of people in the victim’s e-mail address book.

Trojan horses – A Trojan horse is another form of malware. The program appears to perform a desirable function like running an image editing software but actually performs malicious functions.

Worms – A worm is a self-replicating computer program that usually uses a network to send copies of itself to other hosts (computers) and does not require user intervention. Unlike a virus, it needn’t attach itself to an existing program.

All those presented above can become a real problem for your computer, or even for your network. By being a host for any of these you harm other people without even knowing! So why not protect yourself?

The best way of protecting yourself from viruses, worms, trojan horses, rootkits or even backdoors is by using an antivirus. An antivirus is just a software package ment to identify, fight, delete, or quarantine malicious programs. It usually runs once your computer is started and protects your data.

I personally recommend you to use open source software or at least free versions of programs! You could always use comercial versions if you feel you should.

Some of the best antivirus programs are:

Avira Antivirus (Free Version) there is also a comercial version

ClamWin (Open Source)

AVG (Free Version) there is also a comercial version

Kaspersky Antivirus (Comercial) there is also a free trial of 30 days

BitDefender (Comercial) and free trial version

There are many more antivirus software, but in my oppinion these are the best.

You should also use a firewall to prevent hackers/worms from accessing your computer. Some of the best firewall programs are listed below.

Zone Alarm Firewall (Free Version) there is also a comercial security suite.

Comodo Firewall (Free Version)

Kaspersky Internet Security (Comercial)

My first option would be Avira Antivirus + Zone Alarm Free Firewall or the comercial Kaspersky Suite which includes an Antivirus, a Firewall and a Spyware scanner among other protection systems.

If you feel suspicious about the content of a file, you can upload the file to http://www.virustotal.com/ to be scanned online!

In the next post I’ll be talking more about spyware and private information theft! You can subscribe to my rss feed in order to be notified about new posts!