Hitech

Here we share some help with various troubles and oppurtunities that people run into. Below we break down how to prevent viruses and how to manage them when you do get one.

Ever hear the old phrase an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Yeah it works for PC's as well. The typical source of infection is searching for porn, music, movies, and free software. I will not help you find porn. I hate it. I've had enough experience with it to know it's destructive, addictive, and most of all it does not please God. If you don't believe me on the first two counts you can at least agree with me on the third. Enough rant. On another page I will share how to find virus/spyware free music, movies, and free software.

When you're on the internet it's alot like driving a car. You need some basic protection, some basic safety. Your first stop is Anti-virus. There are a lot of pay programs and then there are the free versions. The pay ones you see in the store (you know for sale at Wal-Mart) are good mostly. None of them has caught the new wave of scareware that hs come out and they also do not protect you from yourself. The free ones also do not protect you from the the latest scareware but they will catch the all the same bugs that the others do. My personal favorite anti-virus is AVG. If you are a home user (ie not a business, church, or government) they have a basic free antivirus that will protect you. Almost all the antivirus programs out there have an integrated anti spyware program. However, I have run Spybot Search and Destory behind every big name antivirus out there and am still amazed at what they miss. The creator of Spybot gives it away and I highly recommend you donate to his cause.

I'm not a big fan of firewalls. Now before the it guys flame me to death I will explain why. Norton Internet Security firewall has made me a lot of money be blocking Internet Explorer than I care to admit. After awhile I stopped charging for it and simply told people how to re-enable IE in their firewall. Firewall's are great software to have and they work really well if you know enough about your system to use them. The biggest problem people run into is what to allow and what to deny. Most end users (that's you) have no clue. I can say that I myself have even been confused some times why things don't work only to discover my firewall was blocking something. Their dialog boxes can be cryptic at times and their's no useful back trace feature. For example. svchost.exe asks for access to the internet. Well what is it? Where did it come from? Did I install it? If you are semi computer savy you may start your task manager and notice there's about 10 or more svchost running at a given time. Wat would be really usefull in a firewall is a back trace. Svchost is a generic "wrapper" file that can be called by another program. In short it works like this. Network file... " Hey svchost I need to get something from the network" .... Svchost "Sure I'll do it for you." Many legitimate programs use svchost and if you start blocking them with your firewall I'll be getting a phone call soon when your pc can't get online, or print.

True prevention lies in your hands. Your choice of browser and what you install into it are completely up to you. My first suggestion is to use a browser with a secure mode. IE 8 and firefox both have secure modes. Firefox is my browser of choice in this matter. To get firefox more secure look for the NoScript addon. It takes a few second to install and once installed gives you more defence than most antiviruses can charge you for. NoScript works sort of like a fire wall. With it installed, all web pages (except for a few that allowed by default) are stripped of all their fancy flash animations, annoying ads, and javascript functinality. If you trust a website you can allow it's javascript and flash to run by easily clicking the options button in the bottom right hand of your screen. But be careful. Many websites have linked in advertising which is where the trouble comes in. If "for example" you go to Foxnews.com you will see allow foxnews.com listed in the Options menu. You will also see a long list of other items that are linked in to fox. A majority of these are ad services. I have personally seen scareware installed from these ads. (Foxnews is joined by a long list of other sites that have had their ad services poisoned, places like Msn.com, and Yahoo.com have also served poisoned ads.) So be carefull what you allow here as it carries across to every site you visit. IE8 also has a secure browser method but it's a little more cumbersome. There's an awesome tutorial on ZDNET on how to do that and I will link to it when I find it.

If you somehow get a scareware advertisment here's what to do. First off. Identify it. Is it your antivirus or is it something you've never seen before on your pc. If you've never seen it before then the first thing you do is hit ctrl alt and delete on your keyboard ( I assume we're running a windows that's at least 2000 or above). Your task manager should pop up. Find the offending program and then hit the end task button. Next if you're not to infected you can go to www.safer-networking .org and download Spybot search and destroy. Run it and it "should" take care of it. If it does not, take your pc to a pro because it could get ugly.

I hope this article helps, and I really hope it prevents some of the infections from becoming as bad as I have had to deal with lately.