Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

Continuing my series on securing your computer, I’ve talked about the importance of a good firewall, an anti-virus program, and now I’m going to address the necessity of good malware and spyware programs. While a firewall and anti-virus are absolutely necessary for a computer on the Internet, you can live without a malware/spyware protection. But [...]

Every computer should have an anti-virus software program running, as well as a firewall. Back in the early days of the Internet, before baddies like trojans, worms, and viruses were invented and dispersed, security wasn’t much of an issue. But as with all things, people have taken the benefits of technology and have twisted them [...]

I got my first laptop, an HP Pavilion, in 2003; it came pre-loaded with Windows XP. I made the mistake of connecting it to the Internet BEFORE turning on Windows Firewall. (Oddly, Windows Firewall was turned off by default– DUH!). While downloading Windows updates the first few minutes of using the laptop, I was hit [...]

Lots of virus- and trojan-creators have become quite shifty and sneaky: they are naming their malware after genuine, important software already on our computers. For example, do you have lsass.exe or Isass.exe in your process files list? It’s very difficult to see the difference between the two, but one is a virus and one is [...]

Be very careful what you download. And be very careful with the websites you visit. Before reading this article, I’d never heard of Antivirus XP 2008. It’s not an antivirus, even though it looks, feels, and acts like one. Someone very crafty made this piece of spyware! Antivirus XP 2008 is malware– malicious software. It [...]

I just updated one of my computers to the Grisoft AVG 8.0 version. It’s working very well. AVG is a free email scanner/antivirus program (they also have a paid-for “pro” version). I’ve been using AVG for many years on various computers and I really like it. This new version looks like a million bucks. They’ve [...]