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07/04/2004 Entry: "Internet security tips"

People ask for me for some simple advice about security on the internet.Here is a five minute scan of the basics.I assume people are using Microsoft operating systems, if you are using Linux then you have less to worry about and you probably know enough anyway.

0. Remove yourself from the typical profile: stop using Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook. The Irish Potato Famine was caused by virtually every Irish potato plant having the same genes; one disease wiped out the whole crop (so they say, anyway). There are lots of browser and email alternatives. At home I use Mozilla for both. (www.mozilla.org). Mozilla has more security and privacy features (although many of IE's missing features can be provided by add-ons, but why bother when you can get it in one package?).

1. Anti-virus software. You must use it. You must update it at least weekly. Anti-virus software only works if you get the information about new viruses before the virus gets to your computer.

2. Email software: Don't use Microsoft Outlook. Use Eudora or Mozilla or Thunderbird (the successor to Mozilla's email software) or something else. This will at least take you out of the firing line.

3. Junk or Spam mail:
The volume of junk mail is annoying, plus it increases the risk of accidently activating a junk-mail borne virus because your attention is overwhelmed by 25 to 50 junk mailings per day. Building basic filters to stop spam doesn't work; although new probabilistic learning filters are proving quite effective. Mozilla's email comes with such filtering. Mozilla has a new filter technology called Bayesian filtering . This technology learns; you spend some time identifying which mail is junk and which isn't, and after a few days it is reportedly quite good, certainly much better than existing filters. People report effectiveness over 99% which is very good for a client-based filtering approach.

I have tried two solutions that stop spam before it gets to me. Firstly, I used a "challenge and response" provider (spamarrest.com) and that stops 99.9% of spam (that is an accurate statistic). However, I have swapped to the weirdly named "aliencamel.com" service. This is an excellent service. I get an IMAP account that I can log into securely, which is nice. They apply very good spam filtering, and only bother me about emails they can't be absolutely sure is spam, although they guess, and ask me to confirm the guess. Usually they are right, so in one click the spam is gone. For me, this gets rid of spam and leaves me with a web-based mail service, which is handy since I travel a lot.

I should also point out that since July 2003, Yahoo has very effective spam filters, to the point where I would regard a Yahoo account as being usable again. Plus, as of June 2004, you get 100MB free storage.

4. Filesharing software: if you use Kazaa or other software, your risk profile increases. I have seen from friends who are fond of fileswapping that trojan horses and spyware attacks become quite common (see below).

5. Firewall: You should use this technology. Software firewalls (example, ZoneAlarm, which has a fine free version) require you to understand how the software works; a metaphor to get you started is a police officer at a crime scene. No one is allowed in or out without permission from the firewall (it is different to a bouncer at a club; the bouncer cares about people coming in but does not care about people leaving. A firewall should be just as suspicious of what leaves your computer as what comes in). The problem with firewalls is that you need to know how to use them; once you allow access to a certain program, the firewall stops supervising that program, so you need to be careful. See "spyware".

6. Trojan horses, spyware etc: This software sits on your computer, like a web server, and processes requests from the internet. There are lots of examples of software which continually fetch pornographic advertisements from the internet and display them on your computer in pop-up ads. A firewall can help, because it will either block the trojan horse, or at least alert you to its activity. This is why a firewall is suspicious of traffic leaving your computer as well as traffic coming in.

Get spybot search and destroy, cool free software, and run it once a week, more if you are a filesharer.