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7) Teenagers at Home Do you share your home computer with teenagers? It might already be infected with Trojan horse programs that, like the conquerors of the city of Troy who hid inside a gift of a wooden horse, sneak in hiding inside other programs that appear to be harmless. Examples of Trojans are Netbus and Back Orifice. Teenagers are especially fond of games, which they will download from unsavory sources if they have names like "Jenny McCarthy Strip Poker." Your teens also may download programs that promise to keep them from being booted off chat groups by hackers. Any of these programs might carry a Trojan that opens your computer up to any idiot that can get online.
What is really frightening is that these sneaky programs will wait until you get online and then message intruders that your computer is completely open for entry.
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How to fix this problem: Provide a separate computer for your teens. Make sure it has antivirus software, as it usually protects against the more common Trojans. If the kids complain about weird things happening to their computer, tell them to come to http://www.AntiOnline.com and http://happyhacker.org for help!
So you've put into practice every computer security tip in this article. Are you safe now? You are safer. Unfortunately, if a seriously unscrupulous person still wants to break into your computer, there are many other ways, generally illegal and difficult, to do this. Nevertheless, there is an easy way to thwart almost any computer criminal. If you really, truly want to keep information on your computer out of the hands of intruders, you can store them and email them encrypted (scrambled so no one but you can read them). There are many encryption products which you don't have to be a rocket scientist to use. My favorite is PGP -- Pretty Good Privacy. There are free versions on the Internet, but the commercial version is much easier to install and use (http://www.pgp.com). Get the Enterprise Edition if you want to protect your entire LAN. And when you send emails or files over the Internet or even across your LAN, you can keep them safe from snoopers with PGP.
If you follow these security techniques, you will be safer than 99.9% of today's Internet users. But still not perfectly safe. Oh, well...
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