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The internet is an unsafe place. Your data is at risk. Your right to privacy is being violated. Your identity is going to be stolen, your credit ruined, your career destroyed, your house burned down, your fields will be defiled and your women will be pillaged. Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!

The net has become a bleak place for people that do not practice safe computing methods. Cybercrime is big business these days–it’s no longer the domain of a surly miscreant in a basement writing viruses that infect floppy disks. Now the bad guys are organized, smart, and running their operations like a big business.

Most people are aware of the dangers, but not how to protect themselves. The truth is, if a hacker wants to get into your system, usually the only way to prevent that access is to completely cut the system off from the internet. Even then, there’s still a remote possibility that access can be gained. Just recently, the US Department of Defense reported that a successful network intrusion had been accomplished through the use of a rogue USB flash drive.

On a smaller scale, cyber thieves are interested in capturing information about you: your credit cards, social security number, banking information. The intent is obvious, of course. The worst part is that many security attacks can come from known friends whose own systems have already been compromised.

While it is true that some computer operating systems are more secure than others–Microsoft Windows being the most vulnerable by virtue of its ubuquity and therefore interest to criminals–no one system is 100% safe. The majority of security violations can be pinned squarely on the shoulders of human error, through inattention, ignorance and even apathy.

There are a number of precautions a computer user can take in order to start securing their data. Anti-virus and anti-malware applications are a good start. If you run a Windows system, Avira AntiVir Personal is a decent, free option. Microsoft has also released a good, free antivirus package called Microsoft Security Essentials. I would also recommend using Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware to scan your system on a regular basis. It has been known to catch things other applications miss.

While Linux and Mac users are fairly safe from virus infection, they can still run Windows in a virtual machine, and can pass along infected files. The open source ClamAV is available in both Linux and Mac versions.

Good security practices involve multiple layers of protection. If you have a hardware firewall, use it. Block any inbound ports that are not in use. Use network address translation (NAT) so that the network address of your computer is masked from the outside world. Unless you run a server at home, you won’t need to have the firewall forward ports back to your computer from the outside.

If you don’t have a hardware firewall, use the one built-in to your operating system. All modern versions of Windows, OSX and Linux have firewall options.

ZDNet has the rest of the article HERE!