Protecting Your Computers With A Personal Firewall
A firewall protects your network from unauthorized trespassers. Many routers have firewall functions built in to check traffic leaving or entering the network, but you also should run a personal firewall on each client computer on your WLAN . Personal firewall software usually costs around $40 and it is often bundled with antivirus software. A personal firewall is an application that runs on your computer and protects it against unauthorized access. Like a hardware firewall, it’s configurable to allow or disallow different types of traffic to enter and leave your PC. Personal firewalls monitor ports, which are numbered software addresses that your computer uses for different networking tasks. For example, a Web server communicates through port 80, an e-mail server through port 25. Many of these ports aren’t needed by your PC, and a good personal firewall closes or blocks unused or unneeded ports to prevent an intruder from accessing your computer through one of them. A personal firewall also can monitor activity on your PC and alert you when an application attempts to reach the Internet or your WLAN. This is important because some worms and Trojan horse software attempt to use your computer to infect other computers, or to “phone home” to a cracker so that he can get into your computer. Personal firewalls are an effective way to protect individual computers on your WLAN. Read more on Firewalls . Read more here: Protecting Your Computers With A Personal Firewall
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Protecting Your Computers With A Personal Firewall
How Can I Help My Elderly Friends And Relatives Protect Themselves On The Internet?
For many of us, we have grown up in an age of computers and electronic devices all around us. So when the era of the internet came to pass, there was a leap of knowledge that was needed to adjust but the divide was not that great. For the elderly among us, they can remember a time before the digital age and some of the new technology can seem enticing but yet strange and alien at the same time. Most scams run on the internet today are perpetrated against the elderly. Hopefully I can give you some tips to protect your loved ones. Protecting Your Loved Ones Some people will make a joke and say if you want to protect people from the dangers of the Internet then get a Mac or Linux box and tell them not to use Windows. This is funny but not true especially these days. Macs are becoming more and more popular and everyday new exploits are being found that can be used against them. Exploits are becoming more common and big business on all systems so security is a top priority for all of them. The fact is that most people use a Windows version operating system so you will have to show them how to protect themselves on such machines. Email Security The first thing that you will want to tell them is to be skeptical when it comes to email. People believe that it takes a highly technical genius to scam people on the internet. This is simply not true. Most attacks on people, especially the elderly, are low tech email scams. They will either involve sending a link to a person to get their information through phishing or just a straight out direct scam to get the person to send them money. A lot of the elderly believe everything that they read in their emails and have to be told the many, many different ways that people can be scammed through them. Malicious Programs Another thing that they must be instructed on, is not to open any programs that are sent to them outside of their family or friends. Scammers will send friendly looking e-cards and other digital goodies through an email attachment. Most people would not think that an e-card with hearts and flowers on it would hold a digital ticking time bomb. Looks can be deceiving though. The elderly, just like everyone else, must be taught that attachments, no matter what they look like, can be dangerous. Safe Communications A new attack but one that is growing everyday is the use of the software program Skype to send links to a phishing site. There are a lot of elderly people that use Skype as a cheap and easy way to talk to and see videos of their loved ones. Their relatives might set it up for them so they can be confused as to who is sending a link to them. Skype has a lot of spammers now and the elderly must be warned that it has become just like their emails so they must remain vigilant. Hopefully I have gone over several ways that you can help protect the elderly in your life when they use a computer. It is a new world that they are in so maybe you can help them navigate it. See the original post here: How Can I Help My Elderly Friends And Relatives Protect Themselves On The Internet?
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How Can I Help My Elderly Friends And Relatives Protect Themselves On The Internet?
Phishing – What Is It?
Phishing is an illegitimate method of extracting the personal and other financial details of a person. Basically, it is a process of tricking a person on the internet to retrieve their banking passwords, bank accounts, phone number, credit card details, etc. This practice has grown over exponentially over last few years. The imposters send you emails that can lure you into entering your personal details somehow into the mails sent by them and once they get what they want, they will raise a toast and have a bash on your hard-earned money. The laws and police have become very vigilant and tough to nail these kinds of fraudsters. Fraudulent E-Mails The preferred mode of Phishing is via sending fraudulent emails. Note, though, that reputed organizations like Amazon, eBay and banks never ask anyone for their password in their emails. Next, whenever you open a phishing email, then the link in that mail will always open a site that has no security encryption. For instance, the valid url of the site will not have HTTPS at the beginning and many email links have some other extension like .rs at the end of the email. Moreover, the format of the email is very generic whereas the reputed organization always refers to you with your customer id number in their emails. The most effective manner to remain protected from phishing scams is that you have enough knowledge to recognize one instantly. However, installing pop up blockers and spam filters in your browser is yet another step you can follow. See the original post: Phishing – What Is It?
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Phishing – What Is It?
The Tools You Need To Connect To Your PC Remotely And Securely
One of the things that the Internet has made easier is the ability to work from home. There were private networks that allowed you to do this before but these were only available to the big time people at your company. The cost was simply too great for the company to allow just anyone that worked for them to have this ability. Time To Relax Work But with the advent of the Internet all you now have to do is just have a couple of different pieces of software to securely connect to your work computer from home. After that you are now working from your home office (aka the couch) . I will go over a few of the tools that you will need to allow you to work from home securely. Some you already have on your computer, others you will have to download. The first thing that you are going to want to do after you have decided that you want to work from a remote location, is to decide which software that you will need. The software that you choose will have to have a mixture of security features and ease of use. There are several solutions on the market that will allow you to set up what is called a VPN (virtual private network) . Go To My PC One of the most popular is a piece of software called Gotomypc . It is a VPN solution that has been heavily optimized to allow you to easily and swiftly create a VPN for your business needs. This software receives rave reviews from the tech press and is known as being fairly secure. Tight VNC A popular open source solution for a VPN connection is to use TightVNC . This software is free, provides encryption services, and is fairly well maintained by the people who own it. It is not as easy to use as gotomypc in my opinion but it is still a pretty good option. Windows Remote Desktop Last but not least is Windows very own software that is already installed in your system. This software is simply called Remote Desktop and it will allow you to connect to your computer the same as all of the others. It is not, perhaps, the most elegant solution but it gets the job done. Finish Off With A Strong Firewall Even though you may have a VPN going, you will still need to secure the rest of your network. Some people believe that if they have the VPN working on their network that it is all they need to keep the network secured. This is very wrong. You are still going to need a firewall to keep your network secured as well. You will need to have them work together , as that is how you maintain a secure connection. A strong encrypted VPN along with a good firewall will help keep your system as well as your data transmissions safe. I have walked you through several software solutions that you can use to securely connect to your computer or network remotely. I am sure that you will like the ability to work on your computer remotely when you give it a chance. Read this article: The Tools You Need To Connect To Your PC Remotely And Securely
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The Tools You Need To Connect To Your PC Remotely And Securely