Your Daily Computer Security Tips

A new survey reports that over 10,000 laptops are reported lost each week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports. Laptops are easy to lose, and can disappear in an instant. They are a favorite target for thieves, who can easily resell them. More sophisticated thieves are after the data that is on your laptop, rather than the machine itself.

They are looking for passwords, bank account info, credit card numbers or confidential corporate data. Three-quarters of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop, while 65% said they took no measures to protect all this information. Security checkpoints were the places where laptops were most frequently stolen, perhaps because it is easy to lose track of them.

Keep a firm grip on your laptop at all times. If you put it down, keep it in sight. Have a current backup at the office. Get and use anti-theft devices such as motion detectors, bells, whistles, locks and software that reports the machine’s location if connected to the internet. An ounce of prevention is worth it to keep you from having a bad day!

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One of the most basic functions we do on the Internet is to log in to our programs, email and accounts at various Web sites. We usually do not give it much thought, until we have problems with the process. Then it can be very frustrating.

To avoid any potential headaches, here are a few guidelines and best practices to keep in mind when logging in and out of your programs and applications.

Do not copy and paste your passwords. The contents of your Clipboard (memory) can be seen by a hacker. Avoid similar letters and numbers in your passwords, such as zero (0) and the letter O, and the number one (1) and lower case L – (l). Sooner or later we all mix them up and are unable to log in to our favorite Web site.

Many passwords are case sEnsItiVe! Be careful when entering the information to ensure you use upper and lower case where appropriate. If your login fails, check that the Caps Lock key is not pressed (a light will usually come on when you press Caps Lock, in the upper or right part of your keyboard).

It is a good idea to make all your passwords entirely lower case; this way, you eliminate a potential problem. In any event, upper case is not permitted in some passwords.

You can use the Tab key to quickly jump from field to field, where you have to enter data. Just be sure you are in the correct field. Use the dropdown box for your ID if it is available.

To check this, click the ID or Username field twice, and see if a list of suggestions appears. If it does and the correct ID is listed, click it. This saves time and more importantly, avoids errors. It should not work for the password field.

After you enter your login info, click Submit, Login or press Enter, just once. Do not do anything else at all until you are logged in. Do not touch your mouse or move it.

If you repeatedly fail to log in, check the spelling of your ID and password very carefully, character by character. Try logging in a little later; the site might be busy, or down for maintenance.

A common error is to use valid login info, but for the wrong program. Check that you really are using the right ID and password. If you are not sure, use the “Recover Password” function in the program.

Be sure to log out properly when you are done. Do not simply close the window. In some email and other programs, your account will remain active even if you close the window. Someone else could sit down at your computer and get right back into your application or program with just a click or two.

Finally, if you have surfed the Net for a while, you have probably joined quite a number of programs and Web sites, and have many IDs and passwords. Keep track of them carefully. To minimize the spread of your personal data, cancel your account at sites and programs you no longer need or use.

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here: = > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

You may include these Tips in your Web sites and publications provided they remain unchanged and include the above paragraph, with the author’s name and Web site. You can also get a direct URL to this post. Click the title, then copy the URL in the browser address bar.

That recent release of Firefox 3 seems to have earned Mozilla, maker of Firefox, a new Guinness World Record. Mozilla claims over 8 million copies of the new browser were downloaded in a 24 hour period. At first, the release and download got off to a rocky start, when Mozilla’s site was intermittent.

Overall, Firefox now has over 19% of the browser market. Internet Explorer is down to 74%. I seem to recall not that many years ago when IE had 96% or so of the market. This is a much healthier situation.

Don’t rush to download or use Firefox 3. Bugs were found in it when it was barely a few hours old. Others claim that Firefox 3 security is actually weaker than Firefox 2. Mozilla will continue to support Firefox 2 until December, so you can wait a while for the dust to settle, then go for Firefox 3.

One of the reasons the Web can be a dangerous place is that people are not keeping their software up to date. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has published a study showing that only about 60% of Internet surfers had browsers that were fully patched and current.

If your browser is not up to date, it can be infected with viruses, trojans, worms, etc., or hijacked and used to infect other computers. So everyone who surfs the Net has a public duty to protect their computer, and so in turn protect others and minimize malware.

Firefox users were the best at upgrading their browser in the study, probably due to its autoupdate feature. Fully 83% of Firefox users were up to date (to enable automatic updates, launch Firefox and click Tools, Options, Advanced). Apple’s Safari was next, with 65% of Net surfers using the current version. Internet Explorer came in at a dismal 48% of people using an up to date browser.

Plug-ins represent a separate problem, especially for Firefox. I have said many times that you should minimize the number of plug-ins you have installed, and get them from the browser publisher or other reputable source. Why? Studies have shown that they could compromise the security of your browser. In any case, they need to be kept up to date like any other software.

An unpatched vulnerability in a plug-in can put your computer in danger of being infected, hijacked, etc. The average person may have 6 – 10 plug-ins installed. Keeping them up to date is a painful chore, right? Wrong.

Go here to read how to do it quickly and easily (and almost painlessly):
http://mypcsecurityblog.com/updates/keep-all-your-other-stuff-updated

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here: = > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

You may include these Tips in your Web sites and publications provided they remain unchanged and include the above paragraph, with the author’s name and Web site. You can also get a direct URL to this post. Click the title, then copy the URL in the browser address bar.

You have heard me talk endlessly about good surfing practices, keeping your security programs up to date, not opening spam, etc. etc. Well, are all these precautions really necessary?

Security company McAfee thought they would find out. So it recruited 50 people around the world to throw caution to the wind and answer every spam email and popup they received. Some even gave out their postal address. McAfee provided the computer and email address that the participants used.

On average, each participant got about 70 spam messages a day. These included the familiar Nigerian scam, bank account fraud, medications, porn, “free” stuff, etc. Asking to be removed from the mailing list just made the daily deluge worse (because it confirms your email address is valid and active).

Those that gave out their home address saw an immediate avalanche of junk mail flooding their homes. One hacker tried to hijack the participant’s PayPal account. And their computers slowed down appreciably, as they became clogged with spyware and adware.

U.S. participants received the most spam, followed by Brazil, Italy, England and Australia. The most common phishing emails were fake Chase.com. More details of this experiment will be released next week. In the meantime…. You guessed it ….. keep all your security programs up to date … always!

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here: = > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

You may include these Tips in your Web sites and publications provided they remain unchanged and include the above paragraph, with the author’s name and Web site. You can also get a direct URL to this post. Click the title, then copy the URL in the browser address bar.

Microsoft is slowly getting a handle on those Windows XP Service Pack 3 problems, and a fix should be available soon. A patch is already out that should repair lost Internet or wireless connections. If you haven’t installed SP3 yet, give it a while longer. Just make sure your Windows XP is otherwise up to date.

Meanwhile, a cross-site scripting (XSS) bug has been found in Internet Explorer 6. XSS is used by sites that allow you to enter data. If not properly checked, you could be redirected to a malicious site, your computer could be hijacked or a keylogger installed on your machine, or other nasty stuff could happen to really ruin your day.

Internet Explorer 7 is reportedly not vulnerable to this flaw. Guess what? I think it is about time you IE6 users bit the bullet and upgraded to IE7, which works well now that most of the problems with it have been ironed out. Either that or switch to Firefox.

Now for the shocker: Security company F-secure took a poll asking what browser people were using. Fully 68% chose Firefox, while IE6 and 7 combined got only 14%. Opera got 12%. Firefox sure has come a long way in a relatively short time.

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here: = > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

You may include these Tips in your Web sites and publications provided they remain unchanged and include the above paragraph, with the author’s name and Web site. You can also get a direct URL to this post. Click the title, then copy the URL in the browser address bar.

If your computer is more than a year or two old, you may notice that it is running much slower than it did in the days of its youth. The first culprit we think of in such a situation is spyware and adware. You can easily pick up a lot of this junk as you surf the Web, and it can significantly slow down your PC, or even cause it to crash. Update all your security programs and run them. If the situation does not improve, you may have too many programs starting with Windows, and hogging your system’s resources.

So the usual next step is to go into the msconfig utility and look through the programs that fire up with Windows. We do this by clicking Start, Run, enter “msconfig” (without the quotes) and click OK. Click the Startup tab, and look through the programs, applications, etc.

However, Microsoft has a much better, more comprehensive tool to help with this problem. It is called AutoRuns, and you can get it fr ee here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Download it to your computer. It is a zip file, so right-click it and click Extract All to launch the Extraction Wizard, and follow the steps. In the extracted folder, click autoruns.exe and click Run. Click the Everything tab, and you may be shocked at how many processes run with Windows. To begin with, you can click Options, Hide Microsoft Entries. This will allow you to focus on third party startups. Click on the various tabs to see what is going on.

Most entries are confusing and unclear. To find out what they are, right-click an entry and click Search Online. This usually brings up a Windows Live Search. Go through the results. If they are not too helpful either, repeat the search using Google. For your keyword, use the information in the Autorun Entry column.

If the program is unnecessary or in fact a piece of malware, you can uncheck it. Keep a list of processes you uncheck, in case anything goes wrong. Do not uncheck an entry unless you know what it is. Remember, when you uncheck an item, you are not deleting it. You merely prevent it from starting automatically when Windows starts. You can delete an entry, of course, but I do not recommend this unless you are absolutely sure you do not need or want it.

If you have more than one User account, click User. Select another account and you will see the auto-starting processes for it.

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here: = > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

You may include these Tips in your Web sites and publications provided they remain unchanged and include the above paragraph, with the author’s name and Web site. You can also get a direct URL to this post. Click the title, then copy the URL in the browser address bar.

For some time now you have probably been receiving email spam with subject lines like “You look really stupid in this video” or something to the effect that a long-lost friend is trying to find you. Your first name or part of your email address is often included in the subject line.

These types of targeted attacks are growing rapidly. Security company F-Secure reports that, incredibly, the overall volume of spam more than tripled in one week. It names the Srizbi botnet for the huge increase.

The “look stupid” or “lost friend/classmate” emails try to lure you to a malicious Web site that will infect your computer. Beware of emails that seem to be addressed to you personally. Watch also for emails mentioning your job title or function, or area of expertise. This is simply to make the message more personal, or tailored to you. If you don’t recognize the sender, don’t open it. Be especially wary of clicking on links in such emails.

F-Secure says malware is increasing rapidly, and with the efficiency of a large business. Its malware detections have almost doubled in the last six months, from 500,000 to 900,000, and the situation seems to be getting worse.

Some of these emails may have a link to a Flash video. I have often mentioned that you must keep your security programs up to date. But the same goes for all the applications on your computer, including, for example, Adobe Flash Player. To easily update all your software, go to the Secunia Software Inspector here: http://secunia.com/software_inspector/

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here: = > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

You may include these Tips in your Web sites and publications provided they remain unchanged and include the above paragraph, with the author’s name and Web site. You can also get a direct URL to this post. Click the title, then copy the URL in the browser address bar.

Microsoft has come out with a fix for several bugs in that Vista Service Pack 1. One of the repairs fixes the problem in which you cannot run a large application if your computer has been on for a long time.

If you tried to launch Excel 2007 in this situation, for example, you might get the following error message: “EXCEL.EXE is not a valid Win32 application”.

Other bugs supposedly fixed include crashes when launching Apple’s QuickTime media player, and problems playing certain audio and video content.

Vista SP1 was released to the general public in late March. You can get the latest patch by going to the Windows or Microsoft Update site. Or you can wait for the next Patch Tuesday on July 8, when your computer can download it automatically.

Microsoft has announced that it will ship Windows 7, the successor to Vista, in or around January 2010. It also let it be known that Windows 7 will keep the same core architecture as Vista, to minimize conversion problems to the new operating system.

One of the big problems with Vista was its incompatibility with many popular programs.

On another front, Microsoft also said that it will continue security updates and technical support for our beloved Windows XP until April 2014. Most sales of XP will end on June 30, just a few days from now.

XP has evolved into a good, stable o/s. Keep it up to date, do your security scans, system cleanup and defrag, and it will probably last a long time. Maybe even until Windows 7 comes out!