Do You Know How Important Your Home Computer Security Is?

If you gave taken no action to make your home computer secure you aren’t alone. An estimated 40% of all home users have no security protection for their home computers. Do you know how important your home computer security is?

If you have no computer security the world won’t disintegrate, you won’t grow a second head, and you won’t catch some deadly virus, although your computer might. Many users don’t understand why computer security is so important.

You may not think you are doing anything on your computer that would cause you to worry about security. But let me ask you a couple of questions. Do you do online banking? Do you access your credit cards online? Do you receive email that has personal information in it like your name and address? Do you surf the web?

Answering yes to any of these questions means you and your system are at risk. Not only is your personal information at risk, malicious hackers could access your computer and use it to launch a network attack over the internet. Won’t you be a wee bit surprised when the FBI shows up at your door?

Hackers are a very bright group of individuals. Some hack for fun, other’s have much more malicious objectives. They are very skilled at hiding their tracks and most users will never know if they have an uninvited guest in their computer. Use of someone else’s computer is a very common method for launching denial of service attacks to make a network crash and when the investigation is done you could find your computer the guilty party without you having any knowledge of the events.

Another big problem these days is identity theft. Hackers are obtaining personal information from people’s computers and then stealing their identity. This problem is more wide spread than you might realize with over 10 million reported identity thefts last year alone.

And if you use file sharing programs then you are even at a great risk because spyware, malware, and viruses are easily hidden in these programs.

Key logging is another popular method of stealing your data. Key loggers record each keystroke you make and then email it to the attacker without you even being aware of it. This means if you are entering a password somewhere it now knows that password.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t need to be worrying about viruses, key loggers, and malware with just a few precautions. Run a quality anti virus software package and a firewall. This will eliminate many of your problems, especially when combined with Anti – Spyware software.

You can even run a hardwire firewall to give you added security. In fact if you are running a home business or dealing with anything financial on a regular basis it is highly recommended.

When choosing passwords don’t go for easy. Choose strong passwords that are a minimum of 8 characters in length and combine letters and numbers. Never use a dictionary word. They can be cracked in 3 seconds or less. Yes even words from a foreign dictionary! You should also change your passwords regularly and never write them down.

Don’t fall for emails that are spoofs. Spoof tell you that you must act immediately because there has been a security breach, or their system has crashed or whatever other reason they can think of. They provide a link for you to click to update your records. Never ever access a web site this way! What they are attempting to do is steal your password and login information.

Banks, and companies like eBay and Paypal are often used to conduct these spoof emails. Your bank is never going to loose your information because they have backup and security procedures in place to ensure this doesn’t happen. Secure institutes are not going to refer to you by Hi, or Dear Customer, remember they know your name and who you are.

These spoofs can look very real and if you aren’t paying attention you could fall for one of them. All the security protection in the world won’t help you if you freely hand over your information.

Don’t open email attachments from people you don’t know or you aren’t expecting an attachment from. This is one of the most common methods of infecting your computer with spyware or malware.

Run your anti-spyware software regularly to ensure all tracking cookies and spyware is removed from your computer. You anti-virus software should be running all the time as should your firewall.

Know do you understand how important your home computer security is? Don’t become a victim because you weren’t prepared. Sadly the world isn’t a perfect place and there are criminal elements that are highly intelligent high tech hackers that will stop at no length to get your information. Don’t become a statistics; ensure you have the proper security in place on your home computer.

Deon Melchior is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory. This means that as a publisher you may reprint the articles that are included in our site, as long as the article is unedited and the author box is included with it's live hyperlinks.