by Kuan Hur Tan

Created on: July 17, 2008

A Little Bit of History

There are ways to secure your computer from virus attacks, spyware and stuffs but what are the most efficient and effective ways to do it? I believe, it very much relies on the users themselves rather than the sharing of information or the internet. The attitude and responsibility in using or viewing the information is important to keep your computer safe from attack.

However, no matter how careful you are, there are still possibilities that your computer will be attacked. Luckily, there are tools for you to assist you in making the right decision or even before you could make a decision.

Backup

I personally lost a lot of important files due to viruses a few years back but from there, I learnt. Maybe it is hard for those who are less familiar in IT to learn to backup things or to keep things safe, but that is the way it is. I have articles about ISO images for backup and restore your hard drive but I would rate it as an intermediate computer article. Thus, the easiest way is to copy them into CDs or DVDs and copy the files into an external drive.

Spyware and Malware

All this while, I have managed to remove any spyware and malware without any problems. The most common problem is always the pop up windows. A normal scan with most of the free tools out there such as Spybot and Lavasoft Adware would be able to remove them.

I have always talked about Windows Defender which I find it quite useful in the beginning. It was able to catch some spywares trying to install automatically previously. However, I did not receive any alert since I changed my own policy of managing user account. I will explain below.

Antivirus

Viruses are dangerous. My computer had been infected quite a lot of times. Fortunately, the last time I dealt with a virus was two years ago; my previous workplace computer. In the end, I won without the need to format the computer.

It was a virus made by an Indonesian guy where everytime I logged in to my computer, it will run Internet Explorer automatically and direct it to his website; which was not very nice to visit.

Even if I deleted my user account and created a new one, the virus was still there. In other words, it will affect every user accounts that were created from the machine. I proceeded with the easiest way, which is googling for information. I found ways from McAfee and Symantec which provided a tool to scan the hard drive. I ran the tool from another machine and scanned my computer through the network and finally, removed the

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