"Please state the nature of the medical emergency" Emergency Medical Hologram, Star Trek Voyager.

Computers are one of the most common objects found in a house these days, besides the towel. Almost all of these computers have access to the internet, and therefore access to spyware and viruses. This "malware" can produce damage to data, monitor your surfing habits and even loot your credit card or bank account. This entry will deal with the most common means of malware and means on preventing and protecting a PC running Microsoft Windows XP, currently the most widespread Operating System (OS) in use. As most hitchhikers are really short of cash most of the programs mentioned here are free.

Threats out there

The internet is full of dangers. Spyware and hackers are lurking in every corner to attack, infect and fester in your pc. A computer without protection will be attacked in no time and will receive the digital equivalent of an STD: something nasty that will hurt and will contaminate others you have contact with. A computer may get infected with malware via downloaded files, aggressive cookies or attacked by hackers.

Symptoms of Infection

Once your pc is infected by malware, it will develop several symptoms of infection. Most are annoying and clearly give away that you are infected by malware. I.E.: Your p.c. may run a lot slower than it did before it was infected. Pop-up advertisements in large quantities as you are surfing are also a give-away. (These pop-ups are most likely, but not limited to, pornography.)

The changing of your homepage settings to another site is also a clear sign. Some options in Windows could be disabled. Furthermore, you may have gained toolbars (extra menu-like bars underneath the normal menu bar of your internet browser) to your internet browser which you haven't installed yourself. Your email client may be sending large amounts of spam email. Or your dial-up modem wants to connect to the internet, even though you have broadband and your Modem isn’t even connected to a telephone socket. (Cable or dsl.)

First Line of Defence

The first line of defence is common sense. This may sound silly but it’s true. Never open .exe files in an email, not even email sent to you by your sister, your mom or the CIA. It's most likely spyware. If the sender is familiar to you, you should ask what the file is. The puzzled reaction of your friend is a dead give-away that you have protected yourself!
Also be wary of "phishing" emails. These are emails that seem to come from legit business firms asking you for a confirmation of your credit card number and expire date, or for your PIN -number. Yes, as you could have guessed: these too, are fake.
Pop-ups that claim you are infected with something are most of the time fake. If they are not from your Protection Programs you can easily ignore them. Most of them even say “advertisement” in the window!Common sense should also be advised when allowing, or disallowing programs acces to the internet via your firewall. Allowing all programs acces without checking might just set the doors open for other malware.

Second Line of Defence, or Safety First

Clever thinking isn’t enough. Protecting your pc is also a very big part of a good working and fun to operate computer. You will need a virus-scanner, a firewall and anti-spyware programs. We will look at each of them separately.

Virus scanner: your pc will probably come with a trial version of a virus scanner such as Norton or McAfee.(or no virus scanner at all!) It will work for a limited period of time after which you have to register and pay a yearly fee for updates and usage of the program. The programs will work and do their job, but are heavy users of resource space and are relatively expensive. Much lighter in use and cheaper are AVG or Avast. They are both free and don't take up much resources. One researcher also mentioned Clamwin as a excellent virus scanner. Also make sure that you have the latest updates installed. These programmes, whichever one you choose, will scan your pc for viruses. They will also check your email for viruses and remove them before you have a chance to open the infected file. But they will not scan for spyware or protect you from hackers.

Firewall: best compared to a congierge on the ground floor of an office: only those with approved ID cards will have acces, others are turned away. This program will protect you from attacks from hackers and spyware. The program allows, or blocks programs to access the internet. If you are behind a router the internal Windows XP firewall will do, since the router itself is a hardware-firewall and you only need to monitor the programs that need access to the internet. The XP firewall will not, or badly protect you from attacks from the outside. If you are not behind a router you'll need something stronger. Once again Norton and McAfee have firewalls, these too cost money buy and update. Zone Alarm Free is a good alternative to these programs. It's a simple firewall that works and is free for personal use. A firewall will not scan for viruses or spyware but will protect you from attacks from hackers and aggressive malware.

Anti-spyware program: a program that scans for spyware programs and deletes them. There are several free programs that are really good. The most famous probably being Ad-Aware. Others are Spybot: search and destroy and Windows Defender. They scan your pc for spyware infections. Spybot also blocks entries in your Windows register that are used to host spyware information in. Having one or two of these on your pc and scanning regularly will keep your pc free of spyware, it will not however protect you from viruses or act as a firewall.

These are holy trinity of protecting your pc. However, it is not time to lean back yet. There is another thing that is really important to keep your pc malware free... It is updating! Patch, update and update again! Both Windows and your Protection Programs will continuously issue updates to fix errors (in the case of Windows) or update the programs so that they can withstand new versions of malware. Set Windows and the Protection Programs to Auto-Update, or check regularly for updates.

Doctor, I’m not feeling too well

Should your pc get infected by malware and the programs are unable to solve it, there is a last option: Hijack This. This is not a program like any of the three mentioned above. Its a very powerful tool that monitors what is happening and creates a log of it. This log can be analysed by experts online via various forums or via a database program found on www.hijackthis.de

Links:
Norton http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/index.jsp
McAfee http://www.mcafee.com/us/
AVG Free http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1/lng/us/tpl/v5
AVG general http://www.grisoft.com/doc/1
Avast http://www.avast.com/
Zone Alarm Free http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp?dc=12bms&ctry=NL&lang=nl
Zone Alarm General http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/home.jsp
Ad-Aware http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Spybot: search and destroy http://www.safer-networking.org/
Windows Defender (formerly known as Windows anti spyware) http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
Microsoft www.microsoft.com (search for "microsoft updates, only works in explorer 5 or higher)
Hijack This http://www.merijn.org
Hijack This database analyser http://www.hijackthis.de
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