Do you think you are safe?

What image was drawn in your mind after reading the title? What kind of safety did that question remind you of? Maybe you had a mental picture of murderers! Perhaps you recalled your worn car tires and so on and so forth of all the normal things we tend to think of when we think about our safety. Will you be surprised when I tell that I am asking about different kind of safety and security? The type which I don’t think we, in general, consider when we talk about safety or security.

 

Computer Security or online safety is as important as your other kind of safety. Sometimes, it could be even more vital to your life and the lives of the ones you love. Imagine this scenario, a PhD student loses years of effort, when a hacker compromises his computer and stole and wipe everything, including his thesis! Or terrorist’s agency gets its hand on valuable information about the FBI agents, who work on catching those terrorists, and then know all about them and their families. How about me? I am just a regular student, should I care about this? Yes you do my friend. Computer viruses and worms are all over the internet. They could steal your credit card information, Identity or even spy on you. Spy! How? Whenever I talk with someone about online threats and how dangerous viruses can be, they seem to have the same old idea: computer viruses miss with the computer, delete your data and other kind of problems that you can immediately notice. So, according to them, if your computer is running and your photos and videos are still in it, that means you are viruses-free! That is simply 

incorrect, some kind of viruses cause a different kind of unnoticed problems. Let’s say you downloaded a free music player from untrusted website, that program has a small file that copies everything you write and send it to the program’s developer, including your Facebook, Twitter and emails credentials and your bank and credit cards information! The program would work silently on your computer forever.

Now What should we do to protect ourselves?  here are some helpful tips:

1-Get a good internet security Software.

2-Update your operating system and your antivirus program regularly.

3-Be careful with emails( don't open any unknown attachments, especially those from unknown senders)

4-Scan any removable devices, flash drives, hard disks,CDs ..., before running it.

5-Do Full scan for your computer regularly (once a month for example).

Kaspersky internet security (click on it to go to its website)  is the security program I trust the most.It provides a full protection not only to your computer, data and identity, but also can protect you when you surf the internet. It is packed with a lot of amazing features to ensure a maximum protection (I'll talk about Kaspersky in the future posts).

If you are not willing to pay and you want some free software but yet powerful ,I would recommend Avast antivirus.