Keeping Your Computer Secure
Organizations such as churches and parachurch organizations are often the worst offenders in protecting their systems from viruses, malware, trojans, and other related security threats. Here is a basic overview of what you need and why it is important.
Anti-Virus - This protects you from virus attacks and you should NEVER check your email without your antivirus installed, enabled, and up-to-date. A subscription service keeps your antivirus up-to-date. Make sure you updating is active. We’ve had lots of problems with the Norton AntiVirus (with multiple clients), Norton support as well, and plan to switch to McAfee.
Firewall - Without a firewall, your computer is directly connected to the Internet and has an open door to anyone who wishes to walk into your system. The favorite trick is they download a program to your computer. They can then use this program to relay their spam mail from your computer (instead of theirs) or, even worse, use it to download private information from your computer. The easiest solution is hardware. Install a router (which generally includes a firewall) between your modem and computer. Cheap insurance. The router won’t, however, protect you from attacks from other computers on the same side of the router; that is, on the same network. The solution there is a software firewall on your system. The best method is to have both firewalls on your system.
Anti-Spyware - You still need one more component - an antispyware program installed. This protects you from those malicious programs that ride in on other programs and bury themselves on your computer. This can be malware, such as we already mentioned. Other such programs include programs that monitor your surfing habits and relay these back to advertisers. Fortunately, Microsoft has a free beta version of their anti-spyware available at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en.
Finally, remember to back up your data on a regular basis. In spite of everything you do, your system will eventually crash. It’s not an if - it’s a when. Prepare for it. One little tip here - use Norton’s Partition Magic to create two logical partitions from your one hard disk. Keep Windows and programs on one partition C, and all your data on the other partition D. When the system crashes, you can reformat the C drive, load Windows, and then your programs. The data, over on the D drive, remains intact. You only lose the data on the D drive if the disk drive itself malfunctions. You still need the backup.
I am very aggressive at fighting spam and fraud mail coming into our system. We put the IP (URL) and domain of invasive email in an online database. This will be the IP of the host system supporting the spammer or fraud attempt. The actual spammer is hidden on the host and not available to you. We put this host information in an online database at
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm
Every IP listed here is involved in illegal activity. This database, in turn, is not copyrighted and available for those creative hackers that like to crash host systems.
Here is why this is important to you. We have discovered many church and parachurch organizations running with unprotected systems that have been “captured” by spammers and are being used as relay stations to cloak their own illegal activity. This leaves your system and your host open to the illegal activity of the spammers using your system to relay their mail. We know a lot of this is going on because when we check spamming IPs we find the domain occasionally belongs to some ministry that has nothing to do with the message being carried from the IP. Believe me, there is a LOT of this going on. The moral here is simple - be sure your system is secure.