BinaryWolf

Email Safety Tips:

1. Know how your on-line account information is updated. Do you usually receive an email with a link that takes you to the vendors site? Or do you receive an email telling to go to the vendors site and log in as your normally do? It�s a subtle but important difference with the latter being much safer.

2. To be really safe, never follow a link in an email to update account information.

3. Be wary of messages telling you that access to your account is expiring or about to be denied along with instructions that you have to update your information right now. If you have any questions at all contact your vendor through their normal support channels.

4. Do not download software an email tells you is to protect your computer, even if it appears to come from Microsoft. Microsoft, along with most other vendors will let you download patches and updates directly from their web site.

5. If you believe an update may be required, type the site URL directly into your browser and log into your account from there. If you want to be extra careful open a new browser and type in the URL there.

6. Do not open email attachments that you are not expecting, even if the attachment appears to be from a friend.

7. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Emails that promise you large amounts of money are most likely scams.

Email Safety & Spam, Fraud and Virus Resources

SANS Institute Internet Storm Center

The target audience for this guide (PDF) are home users and small businesses without a firewall, who rely on downloading patches from Microsoft directly. This guide is not a “Windows hardening” guide. See the reference section at the end for more details regarding hardening Windows. Steps outlined in this guide should be seen as minimum due diligence to make it through the first day of using Microsoft Windows XP.

Lavasoft announces the launch of Ad-Aware SE…

There is a category of Ad-Aware users that will always demand even more performance. We share their passion, so we created Ad-Aware SE, an innovative new approach � The New Generation.

Lavasoft, with its Ad-Aware technology, is widely known for delivering comprehensive and secure performance. Together with several newly developed techniques and our newly developed scanning technology Ad-Aware SE delivers heretofore unseen performance on both PCs and workstations. Just like in the past, where Lavasoft was one of the first to offer a comprehensive anti Spyware solution, we’re proud to be the first again to offer a new generation, ground-breaking anti Spyware solution.

I installed Ad-Aware SE after uninstalling version 6, which over the last few months, did not work, even after multiple uninstalls and tweaking. SE worked on the first try. Welcome back Ad-Aware!

Won’t install to Firefox, but does work with IE. I deleted 9 tracking cookies on the first try.

Anti-Spy will remove the following categories of software:
Adware
Backdoors
Browser Helper Objects
DDoS
Dialers
Downloaders
Firewall Killers
Hijackers
Hostile ActiveX
Hostile Java
Hostile Scripts
IRC Ware
Keyloggers
Password Capture
Remote Access Tools (RATs), non-commercial
Spyware
Tracking cookies (optional)
Trojans
Worms

A software firewall installed on your laptop is necessary for those visits to Internet cafes.
Windows XP includes Internet Connection Firewall (ICF) software. Howvever, an old Toshiba laptop running Windows 98 with 32 Mb of memory requires a third party solution. Zone Alarm and Norton Personal Firewall both require minimum system RAM of 48 Mb. Upside, the minimum system requirements for Sygate Personal Firewall is only 32 Mb RAM. Downside, is that after installing Sygate, overall performance suffers on an already sluggish machine.

Anyone have a spare Toshiba memory chip (KTT650/64)?

With new security holes appearing every day and spy/ad-ware spreading rampantly, the combination of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are becoming increasingly dangerous choices for safe web browsing and e-mail. Yet what is one to do if they can’t or won’t switch from Windows to another operating system? It’s simple: bring the security and power of Open Source applications to Windows. The Mozilla Project’s Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client do just that, and do it without sacrificing the easy-to-use, clean interface users demand.

Fire Internet Explorer and Outlook Express With Mozilla Alternatives.