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The internet is increasingly becoming more malicious in intent and cyber-criminology reports for 2008 show a great deal of concern. There are two new security exploits that have recently been discovered and these exploits are sure to form a major part of security issues in 2008. Vishing and phreaking are now two new threats that target voice over ip applications and hack into telephone networks to make long distant phone calls. Reports also estimate that e-commerce and online banking will come to a complete standstill due the much nastier and resilient newer viruses that are being released. Whether you are using the internet at home for online shopping, banking, earning, work, playing games, downloading or just surfing you need to make sure your computer is secure and protected.

The very first step in securing your computer and protecting your information is making sure that you, at the very least, have a well known and credible firewall and antivirus software installed and fully up to date. If your antivirus is not up to date it will not be able to detect newer and recently discovered threats. Personally, I recommend using a top brand name security suite like Norton or Mcafee and I would go for the full suite. That way you get protection against everything from hackers and viruses to email protection and spam prevention. You also need to make sure that your operating system (windows) is up to date and has been patched with the latest security updates from microsoft. Without them your computer is unstable and not secure.
Another ever growing security risk on the internet is spyware/adware. Some of these programs have legitimate uses and won't do much harm but may slow your computer down. Other spyware/adware programs are much more malicious and can cause severe problems. Spyware is also becoming a bigger and much more common problem than viruses and is becoming increasingly difficult to remove. To protect yourself against these unwanted programs I would recommend using at least two different antispyware applications, some of which are available for free. For free I would recommend using ad-aware 2007 personal, spybot search and destroy or spyware doctor which is available for free as part of the google pack.
Now that you have all the security software that you need it is a good idea to scan your computer regularly, ie once a week, to keep any malicious content out. If you don't scan regularly your computer can become infected which if goes undetected can then lead to further infection which will lead to more problems, making it much more difficult to repair. Remember, security is everything on the internet.

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