Protect Your Home and Work PCs

When working at home, you must protect the integrity and privacy of the data that’s required for your work. This ranges from protecting printed material that may be confidential to protecting your PC and data files from loss and/or intrusion – accidental or intentional.

Backup Your Work
There is always the danger of losing your work. Either a diskette is damaged or lost; your PC hard drive crashes or your file becomes corrupt. To prevent this from becoming a disaster, you can make certain that you have backup copies of your work files. This can be done using diskettes, a Zip Drive, a CD-RW drive or other similar storage devices. Your choice may depend on what you have available and how much data you will need to backup.
Utility software can help you by either scheduling a regular backup that would execute specified time interval (like daily) or compress files to allow you to copy more files to your specified storage device (like WinZip). You may find that it’s best to actually have two or more copies of some files, depending on their importance.

Avoid PC Viruses
When referring to computer viruses, we’re often talking about a large variety of files, including Virus, Worms and Trojans. These viruses are files that are created with the intention of causing malicious and/or destructive actions. They can cause loss of productivity, corruption of files, network slowdown or Denial of Service, e-mail delays and loss, confidential file disclosure that result in losses in both your time and data. Furthermore, inadvertently passing them on to other users or organizations can be a cause of tremendous embarrassment and loss of credibility. To lower the risk of contracting a virus, worm or Trojan, users should follow these steps:
a. Purchase a leading anti-virus software package, one that will scan incoming mail messages and files on-access automatically.
b. Update anti-virus software definitions weekly, if not more often (ideally, the AV software should update the virus definitions automatically.) Updates are available at the vendor's Web site and are very simple to perform.
c. Use the anti-virus software to run full disk scans (i.e. scan the entire computer) monthly, if not more often. Full disk scans should also be scheduled to run automatically.
d. Learn how to identify virus hoaxes from real threats. Hoaxes are not harmful, but are “practical jokes” with the intention of causing you feel fear or apprehension. Over-reaction to hoaxes can cause unnecessary panic and overload network bandwidth. To determine whether or not a virus warning is legitimate, visit one of the following sites:
· F-Secure (http://www.f-secure.com/)
· McAfee's Virus Information Library (http://vil.nai.com/vil/)
· Trend (http://www.antivirus.com/), or
· Vmyths (http://online.securityfocus.com/infocus/www.vmyths.com).
e. Scan all floppies, CDs, or other external media that have been used on other systems or that you receive from others (including friends and family).

E-Mail
E-mail can serve as a medium for e-mail viruses and other malicious attacks. Plus, unsolicited e-mails can lower your productivity. Furthermore, unencrypted e-mail may lead to information leaks that can disclose proprietary information or lead to litigation and negative publicity. To lower the risks inherent in e-mail:
a. Do not open attachments unless absolutely necessary, especially if they are sent by someone unknown to the recipient.
b. Do not open EXE, BAT, VBS, and SCR type attachments ever, since they are common vectors for virus and other malicious infections.
c. Always scan attachments manually with antivirus software before opening them, if they must be opened.
d. Consider setting your e-mail client to send messages in plain text (for Outlook go to Tools/Options/Mail Format, and then choose Plain text from the windows below). HTML mail is a potential risk and allows for snooping and malicious code infection.

Web-Based E-Mail Services
Web-based e-mail services, such as Yahoo! and Hotmail, present additional risks to users. These risks may include increased spam, privacy violations, and unauthorized information disclosure. Finally, because they present a more open forum of e-mail exchange, they add to the risk of virus or other malicious infiltration. To lower these risks:
a. Do not use Web-based e-mail systems for the communication of any sensitive information.
b. However boring it might be, you should review the licensing agreement with the service before you click "I Agree". Some free e-mail services actually own the content of your messages sent through their web service.
c. Follow the same attachment policy as listed in the previous section.

Web Browsing
Web browsing might subject the user to privacy violations, theft of data and passwords, virus deployment. To lower these risks:
a. It is strongly suggested to disable dangerous web features, such as ActiveX. ActiveX applets (or "controls" as they are called) are downloadable programs that are run by your system. Unlike the normal EXE files, ActiveX can be run transparently in your Internet Explorer to perform any action such as erasing files or stealing your passwords.
b. Disabling JavaScript is recommended, but may be unrealistic for some users, as many web sites use it for navigation. JavaScript can be used to steal e-mail passwords, form contents and even modify the Windows registry where the system settings and some passwords are recorded.

Firewalls - Prevent Intruding Hackers
Hackers have long plagued the corporate and government networks, and now they're targeting home Internet users and teleworkers with the same dirty tricks. Unfortunately, these users, with their always-on Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and cable modem connections, don't have the protection from an onsite security team and a suite of security devices. Therefore, small office networks and home PC users are susceptible to attack.

For Your Personal Protection
A personal firewall is software designed to protect a single PC from undesired perusal and attack while you are connected to the Internet. Firewalls do this by inspecting both inbound and outbound traffic. Firewalls let the desired applications talk, while restricting all undesired or unknown data traffic, by using security policies the user defines.
Personal firewalls also need to handle intrusion detection, which entails notifying the user of the nature and source of an attack in progress. While secondary to prevention, intrusion detection can warn you of attacks that your current firewall security policy might not protect you from. Firewalls should be able to communicate securely with other hosts when required.
Personal firewalls for standalone PCs are commonly available software. These programs install on your PC and work with most operating systems, including Windows 95/98/NT, and sometimes Windows 2000. Standalone firewalls protect only a single device, and the owners manage them. You can find most of the features that you will need in products that cost less than $50 and some are even free (such as ZoneAlarm http://www.zonelabs.com/). However, cost should be the last thing you consider when buying a firewall.

Ready For Knowledge, Inc.
8665 Sudley Road, #228
Manassas, Virginia 20110 

Phone 703-330-9654
DC & Maryland 866-828-9944 

Email: info@readyforknowledge.com