Tips on how to protect your computer and its users
Here are some quick tips to make your home safer by making the way your family accesses the Internet safer. These are personal preferences, based on my experience, always searching for simple free stuff. Please comment.
1. Keep everyone in your family from getting to dangerous websites: Register with www.opendns.org and set up the web site categories you allow, then follow the instructions on how to activate it. This is free, clean and works for all computers, game consoles etc. It will block a lot of unwanted sites and you can get detailed reports from it. You can add or remove specific sites as you wish. We use it for the whole family. Since it is simple to set up and learn from, you will get real benefits from it. Can a smart kid circumvent this, yes they could.
2. Keep your computer virus, spyware and botnet free. In this region you are likely a Comcast user. Comcast gives the McAfee Internet security suite for free to all its customers. This is a decent program for virus and spyware protection. It pretends to do a lot more but gets quickly cumbersome and complicated. This only works for PCs, not for Macs or game consoles. If you do not have Comcast or you don’t like the McAfee suite, you can certainly rely on the free antivirus sofware from AVG, it works, it is simple. Every now and AVG they will try to get you to buy their more complete package, but as long as you keep going to free.avg.com, you can keep upgrading the free version. Read an interesting NY times article about hackers..
3. Keep your computer up to date: On a PC go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and follow the instructions to turn on and run automatic updates. Icons will appear quite often in the right bottom part of your screen to tell you that a new update needs to be or has been installed, keep installing regularly. This is a slow and annoying process but unavoidable on a PC. Typically a Mac is also set to automatically update, please do not ignore those either.
3. What not to do: Never ever respond to those programs that flash on your screen and say something like: “Warning you need to check your computer for viruses etc….” Usually those warnings are there to entice you to actually install viruses. Also never react or reply or believe message that make you believe things like “this is your unique change to get rich” , “your last chance to prevent your account from being closed“. It’s also better not to forward chain letters since they are used to collect email addresses.
4. Keep kids computer time limited: This is a big challenge, not in the least because there is computer time, game time and TV time. Many solutions just limit Internet time, but not other computer time. To limit computer time I have purchased the solution called Webroot Parental Controls. Fairly solid, not too expensive, and fairly easy to use as long as you don’t try to configure all the applications someone can or can not use. There surely are other options here, I do not endorse this specific program. It also can send regular reports out to tell you where your kids have been and what they have been doing.
5. Be very careful with passwords. Use different passwords for different sites, especially for any website that involves financial or personal transactions. I keep track of all my passwords with a very solid and safe program called KeePass. Do not confound this with Keypass, not what you want. Hackers may have found one of your passwords, and if you used the same everywhere, you could be in trouble.
Bart Louwagie
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