McAfee SiteAdvisor
Davey Winder
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May 21, 2008 4:48 PM
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McAfee | http://www.siteadvisor.com
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Protect your personal data with these essential downloads that offer spyware protection, data encryption and more
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.com
Cost: 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.com
Cost: Free
Overall Rating:***** (5/6 stars)
When it comes to data privacy, there are plenty of reasons why you might want to remain anonymous while browsing the web, and the truly paranoid will want to leave as minimal a click-trail as possible.
Anonymizer does as good a job as any proxy server we’ve seen. It hides your IP address by redirecting your web traffic through the Anonymizer 128-bit SSL secure servers, so the websites you visit see its generic IP address rather than yours.
An integrated antiphishing early-warning tool helps protect you from scams, and the latest Anonymizer works with Vista, too. On the downside, it costs $34 per year and, because your traffic is going through another server layer, it slows down the speed of your browsing.
www.anonymizer.com
Cost: $34/Year
Overall Rating: **** (4/6 stars)
Ultimately, if you want to protect your personal data, there’s one technology you simply have to use: data encryption. Your options here are as varied as they are baffling, but when it comes to value and ease of use few can compare to
the open-source hero TrueCrypt.
This latest version is 32- and 64-bit Vista friendly, as well as being able to write data to removable USB drives and MP3 players. It can encrypt your data at the individual file level or entire hard drive, using 448-bit keys (Blowfish), 256-bit keys (AES, Serpent, Triple DES and Twofish), as well as 128-bit keys (CAST5).
It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file, which can then be mounted as a real disk, and will happily create a fully hidden volume. It’s easy to use thanks to the Windows GUI, will run on Linux, and provides a much more secure environment for your data than, say, a CD in the post.
www.truecrypt.org
Cost: free
Overall Rating: ****** (6/6 stars)
*PC Authority Recommended*
This article appeared in the
June, 2008 issue of PC Authority.