With ‘cyberfraud’ ever increasing, everyone should re-assess how seriously we take data security on a personal level. Here are some essential downloads that can help.
First, ensure your PC is protected by a decent firewall:
Comodo Firewall Pro is free and consistently ends up towards the top of the tree in independent testing. It’s unobtrusive as far as system resource impact is concerned, uses a host intrusion-prevention system to prevent malware from installing, and it also runs on both 32- and 64-bit versions of Vista.
You get all the automatic updates, rootkit and real-time traffic protection you’d expect of a full enterprise-level firewall, but at a price you most certainly wouldn’t.
www.personalfirewall.comodo.comCost: Free
Overall Rating:***** (5/6 stars)
Equally as important is spyware protection, and that’s where
Spybot Search & Destroy 1.5, which is finally fully compatible with both Vista and Firefox, comes to the rescue.
While the interface is in need of modernisation, we can’t knock the performance. It helps prevent spyware and adware getting onto your system in the first place, and if you install it on an already infected PC it works wonders in getting it clean.
Unfortunately, the installation of computer-compromising and data-stealing trojans is the most common kind of infection you’ll pick up when link- clicking, downloading and practising unsafe surfing.
www.safernetworking.org
Cost: Free
Overall Rating:
**** (4/6 stars)
McAfee SiteAdvisor is another free download for Firefox and IE, and it leaves other antiphishing toolbars in the shade by being both unobtrusive and informative.
Perform a Google search and it uses traffic light ticks to warn of the status of a link before you visit: hover over the tick and a balloon appears with more detail; click the balloon to visit the McAfee site for the comprehensive analysis of dangers such as spam email delivery, infected downloads and dodgy affiliate links. The same traffic light principle is applied within the browser itself whenever you visit a site.
www.siteadvisor.comCost: Free
Overall Rating:***** (5/6 stars)