After reading on this and other boards about the frustration people have had with Trojan Horses, Worms and a host of computer virus's I recently dumped Internet Explorer for Mozilla (which I guess is much more secure then IE).

I also run AdAware, Spybot and spyware guard (updated as often as possible).

AVG antivirus and Zone Alarm firewall is updates and on constant guard.

My question is:

How do you maintain security on your Computer?

I am always interested in what the experts have to say!

Red

Well, I don't think that you really need an answer. For casual and general surfing and internet usage, you seem to have a handle on things. All of the above are the best solutions for security, although I personally don't use Mozilla, I still perfer IE.

Seems like you have a pretty good handle on things. I would only have a few additional points to add:

- Stay up on security updates from Microsoft for your OS. A lot of viruses/malicious attacks exploit holes that have been patched. You wouldn't believe how many people don't stay current on those.

- Don't install anything on your computer if you don't know what it is for or who the publisher is.

- Don't ever open emails from people you don't know, no matter how enticing the title looks.

Other than that, I think you are set and far ahead of many people as far as protecting their computer.

Thanks CJ

I am a bit more paranoid these days since a neighbor lost both his desktop and a laptop to these nasties.

I do critcal patch updates as soon as they come out.

Is Mozilla really better (more secure) then IE? Hmm I might have to look into it. I use adaware and spybot too, trend micro for virus and firewall protection.

I think it is. I lurk in spywareinfo.com and almost everyone with a problem, that posts a log has Internet Explorer (I really can't think of a time that it wasn't IE as a matter of fact, but I have been wrong before).

I am no expert though, but hey, it's not like you uninstall IE by trying it, so, since it's free I thought I'd give it a shot.

Red

If you are really worried about losing your stuff, backups might also be a good idea as well.

You can either just back up important data to a CD/DVD or you can buy software that will image your entire hard drive.

I use most of these methods above, the only difference is that I just use System restore as soon as my system hiccups. The back ups are done regularly and its' as easy as pointing and clicking a date until everything is back to normal.

Red,

The best free download that I discoverd while dealing with the Trojan is WinPatrol.

It is my pc watchdog. It monitors all actions on my pc, and it "Barks" at me when an application tries to change any setting or download anything. It has caught a number of attempts to change my start up page, change my media settings, etc.

It is a very valuable tool.

free download
http://www.winpatrol.com/

Another one, not sure if this has been mentioned, Hijack This.
http://www.download.com/HijackThis/3000-80...tml?tag=lst-0-4

FYI, I had to remove 8 different trojans. Each one had a different method. Thanks to google, all of the info to remove these can be found for free on the web.

Once you get your pc clean, leave winpatrol running, and it should catch a lot of the trojans.

Don't forget disaster recovery . . .

I use a relatively inexpensive USB drive with high capacity to do daily incrementals (only changing files) for seven iterations (seven separate backup files, each a day apart).

I'm also using a removeable system drive, so I have a spare system drive to restore to if the primary fails. It's a poor man's hardware mirror. Separate data drive where I install products and keep non-system files. If that fails, I'll restore to a new data drive from the USB drive.

For the real work, like Word docs, spreadsheets and so forth, I use a web backup service. I don't use this for photography as it's too dang expensive. Photos are kept on multiple machines and CD-R, plus the daily backups. I'll loose photos if the place burns down, but other working files will be safely out there in the cloud.

One way of saving the good photos is to put them up on a web printing site. This costs money, but if anything is worth printing, it's also worth keepin in the cloud.

You can never have too many backups of your working data. Everything else can be rebuilt, but restoring from full/incremental backups takes less time, especially with the USB hard drive rather than tape.

We run a wireless network. Access to this network is restricted by MAC address, which is a unique hardware identifier. In other words, if it isn't our hardware, it can't get on the wireless net. Another trick is to limit the number of IP addresses to the number of computers we have on the network, but since one or more might be off, this technique has its limitations. Still, why define a big network when a little one will do?

The only viruses we've had have come from business mail attachments. As the virus scanning software has improved (and yeah, we keep machines current on security patches), this problem hasn't come up for a long time.

Did have some trouble with adware and spyware a while back. Everything's locked down and scanned regularly now. Those bums! Using my machine like that. Redliner helped me out on that situation -- thanks!