With all of today’s viruses and hackers out there, Internet security is more important than ever. With no security in place it is extremely easy for a virus or hacker to access and take control of your computer. There are several reasons why they would want control of your system. You could have sensitive business data that he/she could access or they could use your system to do other hacking, to make it look like you were the culprit. Either way you look at it, viruses and hackers can cost you valuable time and money, if not worse. There are several ways to slow down and hopefully stop them from gaining access to your computer.

You are especially vulnerable if you have an always on high speed internet connection like DSL or Cable. Fortunately most of the time these connections are shared through a dsl/cable router, and just about all routers on the market have at least some sort of firewall built in. A firewall stops all unwanted traffic from coming in on the internet connection. Think of it as a bouncer for your computer, anything that is expected or has a legitimate request can pass through, anything else gets tossed back on the street.

The firewalls that come in the router do a very good job at keeping hackers at bay, but this does not mean you can let your guard down totally. You still need to be careful about where you go and what you do on the internet, as well as keeping your virus scanner up to date with the latest releases of virus definition files.

The people that are using a dial-up connection to the internet are a little less likely to get their system compromised by a hacker, but the threat is still very much there. With a dial-up connection it is a good idea to have a software firewall running. Software firewalls do the same thing as their hardware brethren, but take up your computer’s memory and processor usage.

The drawback to a software firewall is that by default it will probably block a lot of your valid software that you want to get out to the internet. They are also famous for popping up alerts for software trying to access the internet so often that users tend to stop paying attention to them and just click “Yes” or “Allow” every time. A software firewall will take some time to tweak to get it blocking the unwanted software and allowing everything you want to let through without annoyingly asking you every single time.

Probably the most important tool for internet security is knowledge. Users need to know what is safe to do, what is not safe, and need to learn, that if something looks fishy, to just back away. As an example if you are downloading a file that is supposedly a picture, make sure it has an extension that is one of the common image file formats. (.jpg, .gif, .png, .bmp, etc) If it is supposed to be a picture and the file extension is .exe don’t download it, and if you already have, delete it immediately. This is just an example and is not to say that the file may still not be infected with some sort of malware.

Most “Internet Security” suites for sale come with a virus scanner, anti-spyware module, anti-spam, and a firewall. As with anything else, you get what you pay for. There are a bunch of free packages out there, and some of them are quite good, but for the most part you will want to stick with a paid, well known service. Either Mcafee or Norton provide good products at a reasonable price. The thing to keep in mind is that nothing will stop or find 100% of the malware out there. There is always a risk of getting infected, so you still have to be careful about what you download and open.