Complete Newbies Guide to Securing Your Home Computer

[prodikal]

This Tutorial is aimed at newusers to the site looking to secure there home computers i will be basing this on windows because most newbies will be using some sort of windows

where to begin... ??

Antivirus's
an antivurus program is esential to your home computer to help you stop mallicious code from entering and compromising your home system. You will be thinking that you are a very caucious person about opening attatchments from people you dont know and that you use hotmail for email and the attatchments are allready scanned with there on line virii scanner and wouldnt think you would get a virus.Well sadly we would all want to think that but the truth is vrii can enter your computer many diffrent ways and hotmails free virus scanner for your email attatchments doesent always pick up attacments with certain extensions.Also if you download files for research on a website's virii can also be inbeded in zip files im not saying all websites do this but some actually do they are mostly affected with backdoor trojans and worms.Trojans if you allready didnt know are programs that let an attacker gain control of your home system they are mostly all client server based .Worms on the other hand is some code that replicates itself it can have many characteristics some are self replicating most email worms to are made to spread through email like the new bugbear worm which spreads through your email address book if you are infected its charecteristics contain a keylogger and a trojan proggrame it has been the first email virus to appear on the U.K news since the love letter virus i have only nicked the virii that spread through the web they are alsorts that are designed to do all difrent things.Now that we have disscused only 2 of the may diffrent virii on the net we need a program to stop this.Now if like me you havent got a job or are a student and not much cash not to worry they are free antiviruse and online scans on the net i will list a few sites where you can find such programs

www.grisoft.com/html/us_downl.htm << --- AVG a free downloadable antivirus program a lot of people here at antionline use it and say its good but i personnaly havent used it

http://antivirus.cai.com/ ( this once was free but its $19.95) which still is quite cheap

www.free-av.com/ this is a german made av program once again i havent used this

www.trendmicro.com/free_tools this is a free online virii scan

www.pandasoftware.com <-- yet another free downloadable virii scanner


http://www.thefreesite.com/Free_Soft...irus_freeware/ << -- this provides links to more free AV

remember boys and girls your AV software is only as good as its updates atleast up date once every 2 weeks

TROJAN SCANNERS
you will be thinking i have a good antivirus why do i need a trojan scanner because the truth is most AV like norton (which i used) dont completly clean your computer of the nasty software they only seperate it from the rest of your computer .Trojans have been around for as long as the internet the most famous are Sub7 which was written by Mob Man and Backorrifice which was witten by the cult of the dead cow.The C-D-C origanaly wrote backoriffice to show microsoft how much security windows lacked and a spokesman for microsoft said it isnt a security threat in the right hands it could be a very good tool for administators.Now if a microsoft spokesman said that think about how much power someone could hold over your system with one of these programs.So you will be wanting rid of them correct i will provide links to shareware progrmas which are good for a 30 day trial

www.moosoft.com <<--- the cleaner

www.tucows.com/system/trojanscan95.html

http://www.simplysup.com/tremover/download.html

www.softpile.com/Utilities/AntiVirus/ Review_05395_index.html

www.bluechillies.com/details/2181.html - 26k

www.agnitum.com/download/ <<---- tauscan

FIREWALLS
Firewalls are another essential like the AV software you will be thinking why do i need a firewall anyway why would someone want to hack my little windows box when they are bigger and better computers out there and i dont store my creditcard details or any financial records and nothing of importance on it.The answer is simple a lot of hackers look for weak systems to penetrate to use as a jump point.A jump point to a good hacker is important thats why they look for weak systems like home computers school computers etc to launch an attack on a bigger and better host system so the system logs all point back to you and the hacker has left no evidence of him/her being there once again i will be providing links to free firewalls

www.agnitum.com out post a vergood firewall

www.zonelabs.com/ <<--- zone alarm

www.tinysoftware.com/ <<-- tiny personal firewall

www.kerio.com <<-- keiro personal fireawall

www.sygate.com/ <<-- sygate personal firewall

SPYWARE
Spyware is small programs that record your internet activity and report back to a remote host's for research to gather up sites for crummy search engines and stuff like that kAzZa is full of this s**t if your using kAzZa and use a spyware removel tool it wont work anymore so if you really like using kAzZa i suggest you download kazzalite at www.kazalite.tk
so to get rid of this spyware download this tool i currently dont know of anymore spyware removel tools this is called Ad-Aware get it at

www.lavasoftusa.com

keyloggers are also forms of spyware heres a link to a tool to remove keyloggers www.anti-spyware.org/anti_keylogger_pro.asp

wel i hope the new people to the site has found this info helpful
peace

all links courtesy of www.google.com

EDITED FOR ENCRYPTION
as internet hacker kindly pointed out encryption is where you encrpt files and text so you can securly pass it through the internet as internet hacker pointed out. There are many tools for encrypting files there are even tools for encrypting text in a jpeg extension which would be a picture file say your password was computer (just an example) when you encrypt it it would look something like this 1aWr6tYi0E which wouldnt be recognizable to someone sniffing on a gateway or between networks where your transmitting this data look here for tools on encryption

www.webattack.com serach for freeware encryption programs

[Internet Hacker]

Thats a nice tutorial in all but wheres the encryption at? Firewalls are totally useless to pervent data theft during transmission. If a hacker can get your information as it flows through the net he has just breached your security. I think maybe you should add Encryption!

[daveh]

Thanks very much for the useful links, I have Tiny Personal Firewall 3, AVG 6 and Tauscan, but have spent just about forever trying to find decent stuff to help me look after my system, wish I had seen your post a while ago!!!!

[Condor]

Thanks for some useful links. And for the Kazzalite address, I was aware of all the BS in Kazza, but haven't tried Kazzalite. Thanks again.

[poormuttly]

I agree with the author about adding encryption and add an option of iptables or ipchains for starters via Linux. But also beg the question for the Windows users, "How good is Symantec's Norton's Personal Firewall compared to others?"

poormuttly

[phishphreek]

I have the Norton Internet Security 2002 package. I am pretty happy with it. It is easy to use and you it incorporates your antivirus. You can configure it to increase your privacy, alerts, block ads etc.

I also use zone alarm (free) and that is pretty good too. I have that on some of my other machines.

I have yet to see any attacks on my pcs inside the network though. I drop everything at the router/firewall (broadband). I only allow access to one computer on my network which is my media/web server.

I know when I was dial up I did see a lot of activity on it though. Mostly scans for sub7 and the like. I saw a few port scans too, but not too much else.

[nIgHT_OwL_21]

Thanks for some valuable information on a number of things. The only item that has not
worked for me(and yes I have tried every one of the firewalls and carefully configured each
one) were the firewalls. Some how they were always either tunneled thru or comprimised.
I finally took to putting a good antivirus on my pc and a difficult password. took out Outlook
Express and did a few other security tightening measures. So far so good.

[protocolman]

cheers prodikal for that usefull information as a newbie i will be looking into them so thanx again.keep the info coming.

[1:72]

Firewalls are crap, unless you modify them. Zonealarm is biggest load of **** ever, here's most tut i have done about firewalls, read them. No firewall even comes close to making your machine secure.

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=235583

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...0&pagenumber=2

[shockwaveX343]

"Firewalls are another essential like the AV software"

Firewalls are useful but they shouldn't be relied on too heavily to the exent that other
important matters involving system security are ignored many people rely 100% on there
Firewall to shoo off probes and script kiddie they don't close open ports because
theyre confident a Hacker will never make it past there Firewall and I think that's
wrong. A Firewall is useless is someone insists on using kazza and similar software
that opens holes to the outside.

Just my 2 cents

Shockwave