Your Personal Computer: The security of your personal computer.
A.) Regularly apply all security updates provided by your operating system vendor.
B.) It is good practice to scan for viruses, spyware, and malware frequently. Im not going to go into which software I would suggest for these purposes here, since there are many to choose from, and i havnt tried them all. There are many free ones that will manage the primary issues needed, but many payed applications have many bonus features.
1.) On-Access protection: Many anti-virus applications have "on-access" protection which may result in your computer running slower, but this adds an extra layer of security scanning before files get written to your hard drive. This is good idea to keep running in most situations.
2.) Firewall: Monitor your firewalls (these can be hardware embedded, OS system created, or included in many anti-virus applications). Do not enable any ports to be open that you dont need to use for a service.
3.) No-Script: many infections, and attacks are a result of malicious scripting on a compromised (or intentionally malicious) website. If you use firefox (and why wouldn't you at least over IE) you can install the noscript extension which blocks all client side scripting by default. Only after you accept the validity of the source and "white-list" it does this extension allow those scripts to be run.
C.) If your computer is compromised, (there is NO anti-virus which is 100% effective) you may need to "re-image" the system -- this involves formatting and re-installing the operating system and any programs, before virus-scanning and restoring your files.
1.) Alternatively, you may wish to use a linux "live cd" -- since it is a known secure OS to boot and work from and update your passwords, and online account security. A couple free examples that you can download are Knopix, or Ubuntu. These can also be installed to the hard drive, and run much faster installed than from the "live cd".
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