Protecting Your Windows Computer – Free Resources Support

These days, running a computer that's connected to the internet is more likely to end in tears than doing splits naked over a live lobster, especially if you've got broadband. Worms, Trojans, Viruses, script kiddies – there's loads of dangers that can inconvenience you, or even worse – wreck your computer and damage your livelihood. And it's not just protecting your computer from attacks; there's also the problem of protecting your privacy from spy-ware etc.

 

This free article looks at free programs which help protect against pop-up windows, spyware, tracking cookies, viruses, unauthorised connections to the web and external intrusion attempts.

Firewall.

A firewall is essential. Suppose, for example, that you'd been had by the e-card stunt and a program was secretly running on your computer, collecting your credit card details and banking passwords. With a decent firewall, you'll be alerted when the malicious secret executable tries to contact with the net – and you'll get a chance to stop it!

Using your Firewall to monitor program's attempts to connect.

A firewall simply sits between your applications and the net. The one I use, and thoroughly recommend, is ZoneAlarm. It's a free download (click "Download FREE ZoneAlarm") from Zonelabs. I won't go into great detail about how it works here, as there are tutorials on the site, but you 'train' it to allow programs you trust to connect to the net. For the first few days, it'll pop up and say "Do you want to allow internet Explorer to contact the net?" –you click "yes" (and optionally, "remember this answer"). Subsequently, it won't ask you for that program. So if one day, it seemingly randomly asks you if you want to allow a program you've not heard of to contact the net, even when you're not trying to connect with any legitimate application, you can just click "no". Note that this doesn't clean this program from your system – but it does stop your banking details being sent to someone in the ex-soviet union.

Of course, the golden rule of computing that garbage in = garbage out applies; if you don't think carefully about which programs you permit to connect, you could inadvertently be telling ZoneAlarm to allow some horrible Trojan to connect. Consider the connection requests carefully; explorer.exe, winword.exe, outlook.exe etc are all pretty self-explanatory, but some program names aren't easy to work out – so, if in doubt say "no" to connection but don't tell ZoneAlarm to remember the answer; if some favourite program then hangs or doesn't do what you want it to do, you can be sure that the funny-named program belongs to a legitimate application, restart it and then say "yes" to ZoneAlarm and tell it to remember this in the future.

Using a Firewall to monitor outside attempts to break in.

The firewall also monitors intrusion attempts. When you're connected to the net, you're not just connected to the web. Malicious people and programs (like many of the worms that were spreading a few months ago) continually poll for machines connected to the web which aren't protected, and can introduce all kinds of nasties. ZoneAlarm will pop up an informational message telling you every time someone attempts to intrude through your connection – although fortunately, it is for information only; it's already denied access. (You can turn those messages off if they're interrupting you too frequently).

ZoneAlarm shows you that it successfully blocked an intrusion attempt

At the height of the blaster worm, I left my broadband connection on for an hour at lunchtime with no open browsers on my machine and when I came back from my lunch, ZoneAlarm reported 293 attempts to hack into my system! If only one of those were successful, I could've found myself in possession of a machine which was performing a denial of service attack on someone else, sending out spam, or hosting pornography.

It's best to have a firewall whenever you connect to the web; it's essential with broadband, where people tend to have an open connection for as long as the machine is on – and, of course, malicious code can be downloaded very fast without the machine noticeably slowing down and arousing your suspicions.

There were some incompatibilities using ZoneAlarm and the Blueyonder broadband service in the UK on my old machine running Windows ME. These have all disappeared since I upgraded my operating system to Win XP, however.