Security is a hot topic in more ways than one. Hundreds of millions of PCs are connected to the net at any given time and billions of e-mails are sent each day. People are buying mobile devices like there's no tomorrow and hackers are having a field day exploiting a world of new possibilities. The Facebook era opened an entirely new can of worms - excuse the pun. There's an upside though. People are becoming more aware of the need to harden and secure their systems. Firewalls and antivirus applications don't raise eyebrows when mentioned. People realize that Nigerian man isn't really going to give them $16 billion in exchange for a mail-order. But it takes more than just being aware of the threats to effectively deal with them. You need the right tools for the job.
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HomepageAvira AntiVir Personal - FREE Antivirus is a reliable free antivirus solution, that constantly and rapidly scans your computer for malicious programs such as viruses, Trojans, backdoor programs, hoaxes, worms, dialers etc. Monitors every action executed by the user or the operating system and reacts promptly when a malicious program is detected.
Avira AntiVir Personal is a comprehensive, easy to use antivirus program, designed to offer reliable free of charge virus protection to home-users, for personal use only, and is not for business or commercial use. Available for Windows or UNIX.
SuperAntiSpyware Free Edition is 100% Free and will detect and remove thousands of Spyware, Adware, Malware, Trojans, KeyLoggers, Dialers, Hi-Jackers, and Worms.
Online Armor has an excellent free edition now. Which is good news, since it scores almost as well as their paid version. With excellent detection rates and leak tests, great HIPS performance and a "run safer" option that allows you to run specific apps under a different user account with limited permissions. The pop-up system it uses is more user-friendly than Komodo's going to get less and less of them over time. Most users tend to get annoyed by these coastal pop-ups but they're quite necessary to achieve maximum protection. No worries though, online armor free does an excellent job in gradually reducing these messages.
After installation, you can choose to trust old applications currently installed on your computer or run a clever wizard to scan your system for any existing safe applications. Plus it's lighter on your system resources than Komodo. Actually, it has a smaller footprint than any other firewall I've tested so far.
Even though the free version of online armor offers the best protection you can get without coughing up some dough, they also have a premium version which includes some goodies well worth the upgrade. How about a complete anti-virus and anti-malware module? Or a root kit scanner? There is also an online banking mode, web and mail shields, a phishing filter, transparent blocking and DNS spoofing protection. You can download their trial right here.
Browser protection, also called safe browsing, is in fact a quite recent approach to proactively prevent malware infestation. some browsers claim to offer safe browsing, but their implementation isn't quite as efficientNew trojans and rootkits are appearing all the time and antivirus software can't always detect some brand-new varieties. some browsers claim to offer safe browsing, but their implementation isn't quite as efficient and all-inclusive as it should be. True browser protection actually creates a layer between the browser and your operating system. So any operation performed by the browser during your surfing sessions will apply only to this intermediary layer. All your downloads, all executed processes, saved documents, in fact any disk operation will be confined to this layer and can be easily deleted afterwards, leaving no trace of its existence. In this class, sandbox takes to first position with ease. Not only will it work with all browsers, you can use it for virtually any application. Be it your e-mail client or your download manager: any spyware, trojan, virus, worm or other malware threats will be caught by the sandbox layer and blown into oblivion once you push the delete button.
It seems malware is everywhere these days. We get bombarded by phishing attempts and false "missing codecs" alerts. So we install virus scanners and clever anti-spyware tools, as we should. But we still can't help but feeling quirky at times when we see stuff happen we didn't expect. After all, if the hackers find a way past your defenses, it's all up for grabs. All your banking details, sensitive documents, not to forget those rather spicy pictures you keep saved in that inconspicuously named folder.
Thank God there's such a thing as encryption. Just protect your data using powerful 256-bit encryption algorithms, which are virtually impossible to decipher. An intruder will have a field day in hell before he can get to it, trust me. Incidentally, the leader in this class happens to be an open source program. It's called TrueCrypt - a must have for anyone worried about his data. You can use it to create virtual encrypted volumes that are mounted as drives. You can access them through Windows Explorer like you would any hard drive. You can read and write files, move them in and out of encryption on-the-fly. Once configured, TrueCrypt does its thing in the background, you wouldn't even know it's there. Except for the passphrase popups, that is. Ha!
TrueCrypt has several encryption algorithms available including the popular Twofish and AES. They can be stacked and combined in any way to create very strong protection. TrueCrypt is one of those true gems and its pole position in the "market" is a testament to that. It runs fast and light and will beat any contender you throw at it, including Bitlocker. Its graphical user interface has an intuitive layout and offers all the options you could think of, including the ability to hide any volumes or folders currently encrypted. Did I mention you can encrypt entire partitions or USB flash drives? You can even do your Windows drive, enabling the pre-boot authentication feature. TrueCrypt provides plausible deniability, realtime encryption, multi-cpu/core utilization, yup, it's all there. Go get it, Tiger!
You probably know any deleted files can be easily recovered using Windows' Recycle Bin. But are you aware it's fairly straightforward to "bring back" your files even after you've removed them from the bin? You see, like most filesystems, FAT32 and NTFS keep an index of all files currently residing on the drive. Kind of like the index in a book. When you "delete" a file from your computer, Windows simply removes the index entry pointing to that file. In other words, your data is still there and a range of so-called file deletion tools can be used to recover it. And to make bad news even worse, even if the actual blocks on your disk where the data resides are overwritten, more times than not the underlying data can still be resurrected. If not in its entirety, at least partially.
So there you go. What do we do? Well, we overwrite it more than once, of course! While that may seem pretty simple, you have to be careful about which patterns and techniques are used to perform the operation. This is where Eraser comes in. It's a free utility with a proven track record and an enthusiastic user base. You can set up jobs, schedule them and have them use any of the 14 erasure methods available. We have the trusted Gutmann method (including a light version), several techniques developed by the US Department of Defense and the British Secret Service, and so on...
You can provide it with a list of files to replace any nuked files - offering excellent plausible deniability. There's a plug-in system for extra functionality and an option to integrate it with Windows Explorer. What more could you want? Most all of the other secure deletion tools I've tested had something lacking, be it in the functionality department, number of patterns supported or the very ability to effectively and permanently destroy data.