Three Simple Things You Can Do To Secure Your Home Computer

If you have broadband Internet (a cable modem or DSL) at your home, the odds are that your computer is wide open to attack from nefarious (no really!) forces from across the globe. What do they want? Are they just nasty people out to crash your computer and make you sad? Sometimes yes, but often, it is much worse than that. Your unsecured computer with a broadband Internet connection is the perfect staging ground for all of the bad things you've read about the Internet: SPAM, identity theft, and plain old larceny. Your computer, when it comes from the store, has a bunch of "holes" in it that these criminals can look for, and, once found, can be used to take over control of your computer and use it to send out hundreds of SPAM mails a day, or to run a fake bank website, or any of a dozen other things, all without your knowledge.

What can you do?

This page gives you three simple steps you can take to remove any of this pirate garbage that already exists on your computer, and to prevent it from happening again.

1. Clean Your Machine

There are three free tools available to clean this stuff (commonly referred as "Spyware") from your computer. The first is a free virus scanner, and the other two are Spyware removal tools. The best way to use these tools is to download them and burn the installers to a CD from a friend's computer that is already clean. If this isn't convenient, though, you can always download to your hard drive over your own Internet connection.

Once you have downloaded these tools, unplug the network cable from the back of your computer (it looks like a beefed-up phone cable), and restart your computer in Safe Mode. Once it is back up, install and run these three programs:

F-Prot AntiVirus

You may have received an anti-virus package when you bought your computer, but I'm guessing that you either haven't kept it up to date, or it hasn't done it's job. You're now going to use one that I am confident will work, because it is the one that has kept my home and company machines clean for several years. It's a free command-line virus scanner from F-Secure, Inc. So things are super-easy, I've made a little package for you. Here are your instructions:

Download this file.
Put the file you downloaded (fprot.exe) onto your C: Drive in My Computer.
Double-click it, to expand the package.
Hit Enter to accept the default on the installer screen.
Once it's done, go into the new "fprot" folder that was created on your C: Drive.
Double-click the file "Update_Virus_Definitions". This will pop up a black text window that will show lots of stuff that you don't need to worry about. It's getting the latest virus definitions from F-Secure. It might take a little while. When it's done, the text window will go away.

AdAware SE Personal from Lavasoft

This is a great Spyware removal tool, provided free of charge from Lavasoft. Go to their download page: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/, and follow the download links to get the software. Right now, their download page points to a C-net download, and that should be a fine place to get the software. Their link may change in the future, and I can't guarantee that this page will stay up-to-the-minute, but finding the free download from Lavasoft's website should not be a problem to figure out on your own.

SpyBot Search & Destroy

I like this one not only because of the name, but because in conjunction with AdAware, it cleans up almost all the nasties on your machine. The organization that makes it, safer-networking.org, exists on donations. If after this, you feel they've saved your computer's life, you could always send them a couple of bucks, but it's not required. Their download page is here: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html.

Restart and Install

You've downloaded the three tools you need in order to clean your computer. Now, shut down your computer, and unplug the Internet cable from the back. Start your computer in Safe Mode. On Windows 95 and 98 computers, this means pressing the F8 key after the computer makes it's first start-up beep, until a little text menu appears, allowing you to select Safe Mode. On Windows 2000 and XP, it means pressing F8 as the white bar moves across the bottom of the start up screen, then selecting Safe Mode from the resulting menu. Now that your computer is disconnected from the Internet and running Safe Mode, it's time to actually kill the crap.

Go into the "fprot" directory that was created on your C: drive in My Computer earlier. Double-click "Scan_for_Viruses". When the virus program runs, press "TAB" once to highlight "START", then hit enter. F-Prot will scan your whole machine for viruses and fix/remove them.
Go to the folder where you downloaded the installer for AdAware (you do know where you downloaded, to, right?), and double-click the installer to run it. You can generally accept all of the defaults that the installer gives you, including choosing to Run AdAware when the installer finishes. The only thing you'll want to say "No" to is if the program asks if you want to update it's definitions. You can say "No" because you just downloaded the latest version, and also because you're not hooked up to the Internet at the moment. At this point, if you like, you can set up AdAware to always run in the background on your computer and watch for incoming nasties, but honestly, if you follow all of these steps, you won't really need that. Just tell it to scan and clean your system.
In the same download folder, locate the installer for SpyBot Search & Destroy. Run it, accepting the defaults as with AdAware. When's it done, run the installed SpyBot program. Scan and Clean.

Hopefully, these three programs will have rid your computer of the years or months of spyware and viruses that have accumulated on it. In most cases, they are you will need. From time to time, I have run across a bit of malware that needs to be attacked by hand by an experienced pro (like myself), but this isn't about that. This is about easy steps to take care of 99% of your problems.

2. Hide Your Computer

When your computer is on, it is always listening to it's Internet connection, waiting for someone to say "Hello" to it in various ways. Each little hole that it listens through is called a "port". Ideally, your computer should come from the store with all of these ports closed, but it doesn't. A malicious cracking attempt works like this:

BadGuy's Computer:Hello, Internet connected computer! What are you doing today?

Your Computer:Just hanging out.

BadGuy's Computer:Say, what ports do you have open?

Your Computer:Oh, just the FTP, Web, and RCP ports.

BadGuy's Computer:RCP? Kewl! What version?

Your Computer:Just a sec... 4.51.

BadGuy's Computer:4.51, eh? I know a great hack for that! Here we go!

Your Computer:Argh!

So, basically, your computer is talking strangers, and it shouldn't be. The easiest way to stop this is to buy a $30 device called a home router, or a cable/dsl router. This is a box that goes between your cable or DSL modem and computer. Traffic coming in through your cable modem will have to go through this router to get to your computer, and it will only let things through that your computer has specifically asked for. With a router in place, the previous conversation now goes like this:

BadGuy's Computer:Hello, Internet connected computer! What are you doing today?

Your Router:Nobody's home. Go away.

BadGuy's Computer:What's your problem?

Your Router:Sod off.

BadGuy's Computer:Well fine. I'll go bother someone else.

My recommendation is to go to Circuit City and ask them for a "4 port Cable Modem/DSL router". You don't need a wireless router, or the 8 port router or anything fancy. It should cost between $30 and $40. You will also probably need a 3 ft. Ethernet cable. That should be around $5. The reason I sent you to Circuit City is this: I have seen Best Buy, CompUSA and RadioShak treat their customers less than honestly. I play a little game when I go into a technology store. I play dumb. I test the sales staff to see both how knowledgeable they are, and how honest. I have seen salespeople in Best Buy, CompUSA and RadioShak flat out lie to customers in order to sell them much more computer than they need. I have had Best Buy "technicians" give me information and advice that I knew for a fact was completely erroneous. But the Circuit City sales staff, at least in Pittsburgh, have been honest with me, to the point of directing me to a less expensive product that would do the same thing as a more expensive specialized device I was looking for.

Basically, these are truly plug and play. Turn off your computer, then hook things up according to the diagram. Turn on your computer, and you should be back on the Internet, but this time you will feel all tingly inside, because you are now protected from outside intrusion. How does it work? Well, if you care, the router is actually a small, very specialized computer. One side, It connects to the Internet for you, and turns away anyone who comes knocking. On the other side, it lets your computer hook into it to send out Internet traffic and receive the responses. Computers on the outside of the router don't even know how many or what kind of computers you have in your house, because they are stopped at the router. And, even if they could somehow know, due to the way computer addresses are assigned, there is no way for them to get at your computer. There simply isn't. Cable/DSL routers are so cheap, effectively and easy to use, that it's almost negligence that they're not bundled with Cable and DSL Internet packages.

3. Fixing Your Web Browser and Email

If your computer was a morass of spyware and viruses, I'm gong to take a wild guess and say that you use Internet Explorer for your Internet access, and Outlook Express to get and read your email. In fact, a lot of people I work with seem to think that Internet Explorer (Microsoft's crummy web browser) is actually the Internet itself. They just call it "The Internet". They also seem to think that somehow, Outlook Express (Microsoft's crummy email client) is their email, that the program is somehow inextricably linked to their email, and that it is, in fact, the email itself. Of course, that is not the case. The problem is that Internet Explorer and Outlook Express actually invite bad people on the Internet to take over your computer. And the router won't save you, because Internet Explorer isn't just listening for bad guys like your computer used to do, it actively invites them in. So say goodbye to Explorer and Outlook Express, as well as to pop-up windows and email viruses and all kinds of horrible crap.

Mozilla Firefox

It's becoming popular enough now to be on the lower tier news casts. You may have heard of it. It's nothing more than a web browser; a program, like Internet Explorer, that you can use to browse around on the Internet. However, unlike Internet Explorer, it does not try to do all kinds of magic and tie into your computer's guts, and this makes it much safer to use. The holes that cause Internet Explorer to go looking for problems simply do not exist in Firefox. Plus, it stops websites from popping up annoying advertisement windows. Internet Explorer didn't care that someone else was taking control of your computer. Firefox does. Get it at: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Run the installer. It will bring in all of the stuff (bookmarks, passwords, etc.) that you've spent so much time collecting in Internet Explorer, but will leave the bad stuff behind. After you run it for the first time, just delete the Internet Explorer icon from your desktop. You probably won't need it any more, and it would be foolish to fire it up by habit and have it accidentally start inviting the psycho killers over for tea again.

Mozilla Thunderbird

What Firefox is to Internet Explorer, Thunderbird is to Outlook Express. If you had viruses on your computer, it most likely that they came from an email that you received with Outlook Express, whose attachments you never even opened. That's right. In many cases, so much as clicking on virus-laden email in Outlook Express, even to delete it, is enough to infect your computer. That's crap, and it's time you got rid of it. Go to http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird to get it. Run the installer. When you run Thunderbird for the first time, go into the Tools menu, and choose Import. You can easily bring in all of your contacts, settings and emails from Outlook Express. Thunderbird works and looks almost exactly like Outlook Express, with the notable exception of the fact that it doesn't allow viruses to infect your machine.

A Final Word on the Mozilla Products

Nothing in the world can protect your computer from human stupidity. Even though the virus tricks that worked on Internet Explorer and Outlook Express do not work on the Mozilla products, you can still get bad crap onto your computer. For example, if you receive a funny game from your cousin in your email, and you choose to run and play the game, you've just left yourself wide open to attack. How do you know that the person who wrote this little "Shoot the Bunnies" game didn't include something malicious in it? You can keep your virus scanner up to date, and scan everything that comes in, or you can do what I do: don't bother with crap like this that is sent over email. Did you know that video clips in certain formats can trick your computer into downloading certain pieces of software and running them? They can. Likewise, if your kids go onto some illegal software site and start downloading and playing cracked games on your computer, you're begging for trouble. The file sharing networks like Kazaa, Morpheous, etc. are also notorious vectors for infection, and remember that running this stuff on your computer is inviting the outside world in. No virus protection or firewall or router can protect you from bad stuff if you go looking for it and run it yourself. Don't do it. It's not worth it.

What You've Done

You've cleaned all the spyware and viruses from your computer. You've built a wall so that nothing gets into your computer that you haven't invited. You've stopped using software that invites the bad guys in, and started using software that lets you control your computer again. If f-prot, AdAware and SpyBot found a lot of garbage on your machine, it should be running significantly more quickly now. It may even feel like you have a brand new computer! But best of all, you're no longer helping the bad guys to pollute the Internet with SPAM, Denial-of-Service attacks and fraudulent web services. Think about it: before, you were paying (probably a lot) for an Internet connection, and letting other people use it for illegal purposes that made them $! If everyone took these simple steps, maybe the SPAMmers and their ilk would just curl into a ball and implode like Rumplestiltskin. Or maybe not. But you've done is definitely a good thing, and I thank you for being responsible enough for doing your part.