MOG

I started to respond to a humourous post from SatisfiedMind about spam, and it turned into a rather presumpruous lecture on practising safe internet.

If you already know about anti-spyware and anti-virus programs, and firewalls and all that stuff, feel free to skip this little diatribe.

If you don't have such things on your cmputer - either because you didn't think of it or you felt like you couldn't afford to - read on:

You gotta watch with this MySpace stuff - unfortunately, not only have the spammers seized on MySpace and FaceBook and the like to find targets, there are also pages on both (and, i presume, other social-networking sites*) that involve various "exploits" that hook into weaknesses and security glitches in Windows and/or Internet Explorer (and, to a lesser extent, FireFox) to steal data, steal your identity or compromise your computer to secretly take control and use it as part of a "botnet" to send spam or use in "phishing" schemes.

If you follow up any link which you do not know absolutely to be legit and that leads to MySpace or the like, make sure that your Windows has all the latest patches (go to the Windows Update site [requires Internet Explorer 5 or later] to make sure).

Also make sure that your virus software is up - to - date (don't trust anything supplied by MicroSoft). If you don't have anti-virus, you're probably already infected with something - the average time before an unprotected computer linked to the internet is infected is rather less than a minute. If you don't have anti-virus software, get it. A Very Good AV product is AVG from Grisoft, a company in the czech Republic. Best of all, there is a version of AVG that is free for home use, and it's excellent. (The full version is even better, including a fairly robust anti-spyware/anti-malware package and a firewall, as well. When you download it, you get like a month free trial of the full version. Once it expires, i think it automatically switches to the free version, but, if not, you can pay for it - $69.95 for a 2-year license with updates and full tech support - or remove it and install the free version).

Besides anti-virus, you need ant-malware protection. I recommend the free versions ofboth "Ad-Aware":http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Personal-Edition/3000-8022_4-10045910.html?part=dl-ad-aware&subj=dl&tag=top5 and Spybot Search and Destroy, and it wouldn't hurt to get the free version of AVG's anti-malware, if you haven't already got the full AVG Security package... Set 'em up, check for updates [there will be some; new definition files come out every few days], run full scans with both/all of them, and run scans with all every couple weeks.

You'd be amazed what sneaks onto your computer without you knowing it.

DO NOT TRUST THE WINDOWS XP OR WINDOWS VISTA "FIREWALLS". They are pretty damned porous. I like ZoneAlarm, though it has features that make some people itchy - mainly that it can be touchy to uninstall if you decide, for some unfathomable reason, to get rid of it. Like the AVG anti-spyware, ZoneAlarm comes as a free trial download of the full version, which, after fifteen day,s switches to the more limited but still robust free version. It's $49.95 for the full version, so you might consider buying. (I haven't yet, but i'm perpetually broke.) (They are also offering some kind of deal that gets you ZA full version free if you buy something from a "partner". I didn't check that out.)

Once you've got all this stuff - update it and use it. Regularly.

And then go ahead and check out some of those "interesting" sounding MySpace pages...

* And, unfortunately, if MOG doesn't have some of its own, it's only because we're currently small enough to fly under the Bad Guys' radar - if we get reeellly popular - not necessarily on the order of MySpace, but bigger than we are, it will happen here.