Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Archive for August, 2007
Safe Surfing
David Grenda, Founder, Grenda Computer Consulting
We all hear a lot in the news about safe internet surfing. It’s fairly obvious advice about staying away from unsafe places and not handing out personal information. Over the last year or so, I’ve seen a real trend toward another unsafe internet surfing practice that is causing a lot of problems for computer networks.
Internet surfing has always been a cat and mouse game between the people who put forth malicious software to infect your computer and the good folks who try to protect us from it. There are a variety of products on the market to help protect your computer from viruses, mal-ware, spy-ware, and a host of other unfriendly “wares”. Unfortunately, a software program that you inadvertently “invite” down onto your computer is often accepted by the protection software as legitimate. Tricking the user is the new tactic employed to get the problem software past your protection.
Recently there was an email circulating about an “E-Greeting” that a friend has sent to you. Clicking on the link in the email loads your system with a software program that can cause a significant performance problem for your network. The perpetrators are getting more creative at getting their software onto your hard drive.
The best advice is to simply be careful when you surf the internet or open emails. If you are not sure about something, don’t click it or open it. If it looks legitimate, take a 2nd look at it to be sure. Hold your mouse over an internet link without clicking the link. A message will appear showing the true destination for the link. If they don’t match, don’t click it.
I see many problems with poor performance stemming from computers getting loaded with mal-ware from careless internet surfing. Sometimes it’s bad enough to require a reloading of operating system.
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