Safe Surfing
When it comes to the internet it is ultimately the responsibility of the user to keep himself/herself and his/her computer data safe, and that means educating yourself about browsers, viruses, spy ware, phishing and on and on.
So let's begin.
First I want to talk about viruses. You should get a good virus program that has a firewall, updates automatically, real time scan, pop3 scanning, web mail scanning, and compressed file scanning. There are many out there, some good, some bad. I can only speak from my experience on the subject. I have only had one virus in my computer experience, and that is when I got lazy. I have been using PC-Cillin since 2000 and have not had any problems since. Here recently I have switched to Nod32 anti-virus and Outpost Firewall 3.51 and feel both to be very good products. I have had bad experiences with Norton anti-virus; mainly, it sucked the guts out of my computer (makes everything real slow).
Second, is a good spyware/malware program. Search and Destroy is my favorite. It does a very good job.
Once you have established a good firewall and anti-virus and spyware program, you need a good email program. Most people use MS Outlook Express because it came with Windows. This is one of the worst programs on the market when it comes to security. Before I switched to Opera Browser which has a very secure email program included, I used Eudora which is a very nice email program. There is also The Bat, which I have heard good things about. The things to look for in a good email program are suppression of external embeds and suppression of graphics. I'm not talking about excluding them, but temporally blocking them until you determine the sender is safe. If the sender is not recognized or you feel the sender is unsafe, you can delete the email without ill effects. Also the suppressed internal imbeds help stop spammers from getting your email address. Sometimes the spammers send out a mass mailing and the images are on their servers waiting for you to open your email. When you open your email it pulls the images from their servers and lets them know they have a live email address, which adds your email to their mailing list, which they then sell to other spammers.
The browser you use is very important! Most people use MS Internet Explorer because it came with MS Windows. This is a very dangerous browser, just look at this page . The main problems with IE6-7 is that it is tied to the operating system, meaning that if attacked by a virus your whole system is at risk. That is why when IE crashes, it usually causes windows to crash too. The next problem is Active X. This MS plug-in is so powerful that if used incorrectly or maliciously a person can take control of your computer and destroy your whole system. Put the two together and you have a very high security risk.
A work in progress.