From The Dungeon. 20 Nov 2006
Allan Copland GM1SXX
Protecting your PC.
In my daily work as an ICT Engineer, I'm charged with managing our college-wide anti-virus protection. We use around 2000 PC's and around 40 servers and provide computing facilities for over 14,000 people. For such a large installation, it's necessary to use a centralised antivirus (AV) management system. Our AV software licence expired recently so I was asked to look at the options available.
After a perusal of what was on offer, we ended up looking at two products, Sophos and AVG professional Anti-Virus. The contest was tight but we eventually decided to renew our contract with Sophos for two more years. This allows us to centrally manage our pool of PC's and servers via a dedicated 'front end' program that maintains a database of the machines on our domain. It works very well for us and we have been happy with the product for several years.
Now to home PC's. Many users seem to think that they can do without any sort of AV protection. While this may be true for a PC that's not connected to the internet and never has floppy disks, memory pens or ANY other device that can transport software used with it, that would be a VERY unusual situation indeed. Examples of such systems might be point-of-sale systems or dedicated intelligent terminals connected to a 'trusted' system. Embedded systems in short.
For the rest of us, and thats about 99.9999%, some sort of AV protection is absolutely essential. So too is a firewall, if your PC is connected to the wobbly-wide-web via any sort of device, be it a MODEM, a Router, a wired connection or anything else. If you dont have these tools installed on your PC, you can be confident that it will be compromised in very short order!
Many people resort to using commercial third-party products for this but it's possible to protect your PC for free.
If you are running Windows XP, there's a firewall built-in, so you can use that along with some sort of AV product. For other Win-doze operating systems, you can use a product like Zone Alarm or Sygate personal Firewall. Both are free for non-commercial use and of the two noted, Sygate Personal Firewall (SPF) is my personal favourite. SPF.EXE is available for download from a number of Internet sites. A web search for 'Sygate Personal Firewall' should locate it for you. Just download the file 'spf.exe' and run the program. When initially installed, you'll notice that it often asks is a particular item should be let through. YOU have to decide whether or not to allow packets to be received or sent for the first while. In this way, SPF can be 'trained' to meet your needs as a firewall program. Firewalls 'sit' between your PC and the Internet and sift or filter incoming and outgoing 'data packets'. In this was, you can control what is and is not allowed to pass to your machine.
Now to AV products for home use. Sophos is too expensive for single-user systems. Both AVG and Sophos are aimed at the corporate user with many PC's to protect. Being a canny Scot, I hate to be parted from perfectly good cash, so the good news is that AVG allow their product to be used for domestic (ie non-commercial) use free of charge. This is very commendable and I can only imagine that their reason for doing so is that commercial sales are made on the back of satisfied domestic users who work in the IT sector and would then buy the product for commercial use. Whatever their logic, you are free to use AVG in a non-commercial setting and it's an excellent product that I can thoroughly recommend. One reason for this is that once installed, AVG periodically contacts the AVG servers for regular updates. This periodic update process is vital for continued protection of your system. Many of the threats encountered now are not actually viruses but in fact 'trojans'. Trojans work like the 'trojan horse' in the story... they carry a malicious 'payload' that can cause harm. Some collect keystrokes and send them to places unknown (think electronic banking). 'Phishing' ... pronounced fishing, is a commonplace use for trojans. AVG will find and destroy many trojans, keeping your machine clear of 'nasties'. A web search for 'AVG free' should locate the free edition. Download and enjoy the peace of mind it brings.
Two other items I'd never be without are 'Crap Cleaner', also free, and some type of registry cleaner/compactor.
Crap Cleaner as the name suggests scans the registry for things that are no longer needed and removes them. The 'Windows registry' is Windows' central database of what's installed on the machine and what program its associated with. It's absolutely central to the operation of Windows so don't even think of messing with it unless you REALLY know what you are doing. As you might imagine, the Windows registry has a lot going on and in time becomes choked with all manner of rubbish, bad/broken links, pointers to programs long deleted etc.
Run Crap Cleaner twice a week and you'll be surprised at all the rubbish it finds and removes from your system. Best of all, it's free for domestic use.
Web Security. As you may know, the Internet relies heavily on the use of 'cookies', small strings of data that identify you as a returning visitor to specific websites. Ordinarily, cookies are not malicious, but they can be. It therefore pays to set your internet browser to delete cookies at the end of each session along with any cached data that may be stored. Usually you can do this within the Tools/Internet Options within Internet Explorer. Set the cache size to zero and also the number of days that data are stored for. This purges your history and cookies files every time you close down Explorer.
Internet Explorer is only one of many 'web browsers' available to you. It's there because MICROSOFT want you to use it. I believe it was the subject of a lawsuit between Microsoft and the EU thats still ongoing. My own take on it is that because modern operating systems are shifting to a web based interface, Microsoft wanted it to be part of the systems. With operating systems like XP, the web browser is essentially a part of the Operating System (OS). To ship XP without a browser would be like selling a new car with no wheels. Wheels as an 'optional extra' if you will. You are not limited to using Internet Explorer though so I personally feel that it's not so bad to ship it with the OS. If you don't like it, there are alternative web browsers. My personal favourite is Mozilla Firefox. From my point of view (and it's only that), it has better security than Internet Explorer and it's easily configured to make your machine as secure as is reasonable.
Some sort of registry cleaner (in addition to Crap Cleaner) and registry compactor program is highly desirable. Crap Cleaner will remove a lot of the rubbish from your registry but what it doesn't do is squeeze the empty spaces created out of the registry file. There are a number of registry cleaner programs out there that will not only clean the registry, they will also 'compact' it resulting in better performance. I don't know of any good free ones. Perhaps you know of a good free registry cleaner/compactor? If so, email me direct at allan_gm1sxx@hotmail.com and include the words 'registry cleaner' in the message header.
As you'll now be aware, the Windows registry is big, complex and a source of some of the problems that slow down your PC. Keeping the registry clean and as compact as possible helps maintain the performance of your PC. Windows is modular and the registry is key to tying things together so windows runs smoothly. Treat it with great care. It's easily broken.
One has to wonder why Microsoft don't include some sort of registry cleaning tool along with their operating systems. The registry is critical to the operation of Windows and left to it's own devices, will degenerate over time, causing odd problems and generally causing the machine's performance to suffer. Strange that of all the tools supplied with Windows, there is not one to clean, 'sanitise' and compact the registry. Maybe next time, with Vista?
Lastly, I'd advise all PC users to periodically check what installed on their system and uninstall programs they don't use any more. ONLY do this if you KNOW what you are uninstalling! If you don't, leave well alone.
Software sources....
Crap Cleaner
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
Sygate personal Firewall
http://www.tucows.com/get/213160_90233
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/5390/lng/us/tpl/v5
Mozilla Firefox
Some of these links may eventually expire but you can use some plain old savvy to
find what you need with a Google Search.
As the saying goes.... 'Google is your friend'.... or is it? I'll leave it to
you to think of why Google might not actually be 'your friend'.
A few more points, and they are big 'uns.
1) NEVER set your email reader to display the contents of incoming messages. This is a very risky thing to do since you are effectively 'inviting' anyone who wishes to drop malware on your system. We always caution our users against this.
2) NEVER open emails with no title field. This is a favoured method of distributing malware. Be sensible in what messages you actually open. The majority of messages that come into our college are junk and some contain malware. It's now the case that the junk exceeds the good wanted messages, but that could be for another 'Dunny Special'.
3) Take great care with what you read or open. If it's not from someone you know or a listserver you trust, the best plan of action is simply to delete it. Remember... curiosity killed the cat!
Keep safe, and protect your PC. You can do it for free!
73 Al.
GM1SXX