This weekend I spent some time fixing family and friends’ computers. This of course is a pretty typical event. For those of you who are handy with computers I’m sure your weekends are filled with much of the same and for those of you who are not– I’m sure yours is filled with the pains my acquaintances know all too well: downtime.

In a world where we rely on our computers at home and work to give us access to the Internet for vital tasks (i.e. bill payment, finance management, communication, and data storage) downtime is truly a costly item to deal with. Whether your personal or business computer, security is much more accessible than one may think. Better yet– aside from the time invested installing and maintaining these little gems of software (say an hour a week at the most if you’re obsessive about it like me) we’re talking no money here. When you’re humming along though and not wasting time trying to fix it– then you’ll see how much time a hour of prevention is worth compared to a few days of data recovery.

Software

Security software comes in two segments– prevention and recovery. In general, prevention applications run 24/7 in the background of your computer. A big issue is resource intensive security programs, but bloat does not equal protection. Therefore a true preventive security program will use minimal amounts of resources to provide maximum protection. A recovery program is one that let’s you recover or fix problem after an infection occurs. In general, no protective software is going to 100% cover every possible threat so you have to be prepared for the exception and ready to react in removal when it happens. Recovery programs need to be able to avoid being blocked by infections and work to secure holes while evading traps left by the malicious program. Let’s tackle common areas of security:

• Malware – Malware is any program that intentionally causes harm or attempts to exploit your machines for benefit. Commonly referred to as “spyware”, malware programs usually turn your machine into a spam, ad, or virus factory benefiting their maker in the process.
  • Proactive – Spybot Search & Destroy: Developed as a final college research project by its creator, Spybot has grown into a full security suite for the prevention and detection of spyware. Spybot runs actively in the background and can be programmed to perform scans on your system during off hours. The active shield is not resource intensive, but the scans are and that is why it is better to automate the scan for an overnight run while you sleep.
  • Reactive – Malware Bytes: Malware Bytes works well to remove 99.9% of malware infections. Even the worst infections are easily remove with one sweep and a reboot. We use this one routinely in our Tech Support Call Center to root out problems and get PCs back in working order ASAP.
• Virus – A virus is a computer program intentionally programmed to install without permission and cause harm to the underlying system it runs on. It also tends to try to spread itself and proactively replicate it’s infection using known exploits in specific operating systems or programs. Malware is annoying– viruses are disastrous.
  • Proactive – AVG Free: AVG Free is the same anti-virus program found in the AVG Internet and Security Suites, but because it doesn’t have all the extra programs in it the application is leaner and runs quicker. AVG Free is noticeably less resource intensive than other competing products and provides an excellent level of protection that is in general superior to what other pay products offer as a whole. The one downside is the product is known to have nag screens trying to get you to buy the pay version of the software, but those are far between during major upgrades and not overall intrusive in nature.
  • Reactive – SyncBack Free: SyncBack is an easy to use back up utility that allows you to sync your data between either a spare hard drive or to a remote site (via FTP over the Net). The trick here is to back up your data to a spare hard drive in your computer and if disaster happens you can simply either copy the data back over the primary hard drive from the swap or just wholesale yank out the “bad” primary and change over to the “good” spare. You can then safely format that “bad” hard drive in another PC and put it back in as a the spare at a later time. I have a good friend who has more than once averted virus disaster through back up and restore. Even if it’s not for virus protection, backing up your data is a good idea in case the primary drive did fail due to normal hardware deterioration.
• Registry Repair – CCleaner: CCleaner comes in handy after the post malware or virus removal to make sure your Windows Registry is back in proper working order. Malicious programs aren’t particularly neat when it comes to installation and obviously less particular about being removed. The result is that simply removing the virus can leave gaps in your registry and malformed links that will lead to system crashes. CCleaner addresses that cleaning out both temporary files and fixing registry errors.
• Prevention – There are several steps you should routinely take to prevent problems:

1. Install operating system updates weekly and make sure your system update notification feature is on to let you know when they come out.
2. Make sure you update your anti-virus program daily and malware prevention programs weekly.
3. Run daily off hour antivirus and malware removal scans during off hours.
4. Make sure to run CCleaner once a month after rebooting first to install all “hanging updates” that may be out there.

You should also consider switching to an alternative web browser like Firefox to insure you take advantage of AVG Free’s active toolbar and search protection. We’ll be doing a run down at a later date on Firefox add on’s you can install to further bolster protection. Also, backing up your data weekly is a good idea and a great “escape plan” if disaster does happen.

I hope you see that security does not have to be complex in nature or hard to pull off. Using the above applications will help do some primary hardening of your system and help to keep your PC running in good order long term.