5 Things You Should Do Right Now

by Jack Yates, Safety Committee

Change your Internet passwords.

The rules for safe passwords are: There must be 8 or more digits, at least one capital letter and 1 number. You say you did this? Wonderful. You should continue to change your password every 6 months particularly on critical accesses like banks, credit cards and brokerage accounts.

Update your computer defenses.

Update your firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, and a new one, anti-malware. "Sounds like too many things to do. I don't have anything on my hard drive that anyone wants." Don't be so sure. If Hackers can't get your money they will use your hard drive to make money. How? Hackers will take charge of your hard drive and use it to send out Spam Email and Phishing scams throughout the world every time you go on the Internet. At rates of almost 1/2 cents a piece, that's good money for people from Korea, Russia, South Africa, China and elsewhere. The important thing here is not only is it slowing down your computer but everyone else on the WI-FI network. Yes we all suffer when thousands maybe millions of Emails are sent all day long from our computers.

Install or have installed anti-malware software. 

Anti-malware software like www.malwarebytes.com searches your registry and other files for Trojan Horses. These are sneaky programs that can hide away from all the other anti programs you have installed and do all kinds of damage. Some of these are; follow you on the Internet, pick up passwords and Id's, steal your identity and load up your WI-FI with spam and scams being sent to others just to name a few. 

Scan your drives.

Make it a habit of scanning your drives at regular intervals (including your flash drive) with the programs mentioned above. They all serve a purpose to keep you safe and allow you to have an enjoyable time on the Internet.

Other solutions.

There are free programs to check your firewall, your anti-virus checker and open ports. One program comes with Windows and does a system file check to check and fix any system files that have changed or been corrupted. I have straightened out my computer several times using it. Go to Start - Run and type sfc /scannow and wait until the scan is finished. It may or may not tell you of any results. You have to trust that it did it's job. Of course you need to do this before you loose your operating system. Look for weird unusual things happening.

If you would like more information of this type please let me know.

Jack