5 Things you can do to improve the security of your Home PC
Author: Brooke M. Perry
Improving the security of your PC has become one of the difficult things do especially when millions of threats like viruses and malware are lurking into the web. It has become very important today to ensure the PC security because we use our computers for doing a lot of things such as Internet banking, shopping, payment of utility bills, email, social networking and others. As computers play a very important role in our life today, it becomes more than important to ensure their security anyhow.
Below listed are the 5 ways using which you can improve the security of your home PC:
Always connect to a secure network
Do you know that when you connect your PC to the internet it also gets connected to millions of other PCs connected to the web at the same time? This allows hackers and virus authors to access your PC and do the harms which they intend. The information which you seek from the internet first comes to your modem then router and then your PC. Because the modem is not equipped with any security features, it becomes important for you to secure your router. Ensure to secure the router before you connect your PC to the internet. It improves the computer security by many times and minimizes the risk of infection.
Enable and configure a firewall
Firewall is an important security component that protects your PC from phishing and scams. It is in fact a device which regulates the flow of information which flows between your PC and the web. It is more like a router in terms of features. All the modern operating systems offer firewall as a software. Apart from the firewall offered by the OS, home PCs also have built-in firewall. For this you should consult your service provider to know how to enable the firewall on your network.
Install effective antivirus and antispyware software
The third step towards improving the security of your home PC is to install effective antivirus and antispyware software on your computer. It is also important to keep the software up-to-date to avail complete security from even newer threats.
Modern antivirus and antispyware can detect viruses and malware on the basis of the pattern exhibited by these threats in the files or memory of your PC. These software work on the basis of virus signatures which is provided by software vendors to detect the malware. Vendors constantly update the signatures with the discovery of new malware on the daily basis. For impeccable security against online threats it is mandatory that your antivirus program uses the updated signatures for detecting malware.
It is important that you enable the feature so that the antivirus program detects malware on the basis of current signatures. There are many rogue software available on the internet so be careful and install the antivirus program either through a CD or the website of the vendor.
Secure your web browser
Web browsers are an important gateway for online threats because of their inherent security vulnerabilities. You should know that the web browsers installed on your PC don't have the enough secure default settings most of the time. So the next step towards protecting your home PC is to secure your web browser. It becomes more important today because most of the security incidents are taking place because of the vulnerabilities existing in the web browser. From the next time when you start browsing the internet make sure that you have done the following to secure your browser.
- Disabled the mobile code such as Java, JavaScript, Flash, and ActiveX
- Disabled options to always set cookies
- Configured the browser to ask for your permission for setting a cookie.
Install software updates and enable automatic updates
Most of the software development companies release updates on regular intervals to patch security vulnerabilities, flaws and bugs and improve the program to detect even newer threats. Most of the users treat these updates unnecessary and ignore it. This is not a good practice and makes your PC vulnerable to virus attacks. Always install the updates and enable the automatic updates so that you never miss any security update.
Before the Conficker virus struck computers worldwide in 2008, Microsoft had released a security update. If users would have installed the update on their PCs, they would have mitigated the impact of this virus to a greater extent. So always treat software updates at high priority and never ever miss it.
Above discussed are the 5 ways though which you can improve the security of your home PC. Apart from these there are many other ways that help you improve the PC security. You can also opt for standard practices of internet browsing like not visiting any website which you don't know, not clicking on link or attachments coming from an unknown source etc.
Article Source:
http://www.articlesbase.com/security-articles/5-things-you-can-do-to-improve-the-security-of-your-home-pc-6564878.html
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