Internet-Security-Store.com

It’s customary to think of firewalls as protecting PCs from malicious intruders. Indeed, this is a crucially important function – but a good firewall should do more. It should control outgoing traffic, too.
More than ever before, cyber crooks are hunting for personal information, principally because it is this that enables them to get into bank accounts and steal money. And they’ve been busy devising technology that uses your PC’s Internet connection to send data they’ve obtained from your machine out to their own computers.
One of these unpleasant innovations is the keylogger, a program which sneaks through your device’s defenses and sits inside your computer, stealthily recording every single tap you make on your keyboard. One-way firewalls are powerless to prevent it from sending stolen data out into criminal hands. A good two-way firewall, such as Norton Personal Firewall, will stop such unauthorized data transmission in its tracks, rendering the keylogger totally useless. It’ll also instantly alert you to a keylogger’s appearance on your PC so that you can get rid of it without delay.
Two-way firewalls also protect against spyware – malicious programs that transmit information through the Internet to outside third parties about your surfing habits. Firewalls like this effectively create a secure perimeter around your computer with virtual sentinels guarding every point of entry and exit; all traffic, incoming and outgoing, is inspected before being permitted through. If traffic which you haven’t authorized attempts to get in or out, you’ll be prompted to take action or it’ll be blocked.
Norton Personal Firewall can be found on Symantec’s award-winning internet security tools such as Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton 360.

Cyber crime is a truly global business today; forget about the geeky adolescent hacker of yore operating mischievously from his college dorm room. Today’s cybercriminals are vastly more sophisticated, and vastly more organized. They have effectively ensured that surfing the web has become a potentially hazardous activity for all who fail to shield themselves with firewalls, powerful antivirus products like Norton Antivirus, or internet security tools.
An example of the sheer scale and sophistication of cybercrime today has just emerged from the Netherlands, where Dutch police teamed up successfully with IT security forms to hobble an especially malicious crimewave which used the Bredolab Trojan. This nasty bug allowed thieves to harvest private information from unsuspecting PC users, including bank log-in details, and has infected an estimated 30 million computers across the world since it first made its appearance in July 2009.
The police operation has not removed the virus from infected machines, but it has decapitated the criminal command system which had hijacked and controlled them. Security firm Fox-IT and the Dutch computer emergency response team, GOVCERT.NL, collaborated with the Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI) to take down 143 servers linked to the botnet.
Whereas it’s good to know that law enforcement agencies are adopting highly advanced methods of crime detection and prevention to limit the reach of cyber thieves, it’s an ongoing battle which will almost certainly never be conclusively won. Shielding your PC with powerful stand alone computer virus protection products or more encompassing software suites like Norton Internet Security 2010 has, sadly, never been more necessary.

Although it’s becoming twenty-first century common sense for computer users to protect their machines with robust antivirus products like Norton Antivirus or more encompassing suites like Norton Internet Security 2011, there are still large numbers of people who remain either sceptical or blasé about the risks. IT security giant Symantec revealed in its Internet Security Threat Report earlier this month that hackers were responsible for the theft of a staggering 130 million credit card numbers last year, and in the third quarter of 2009 alone no less than $120 million disappeared from people’s online banking accounts due to fraud.
Trojans, botnets and scareware have become the commonest form of malware, with Trojan downloaders being the most common of all. A Trojan is essentially a harmful program which masquerades as something benign, and downloader programs do exactly as their name suggest – secretly downloading more malware. To get infected, users don’t even have to click on suspicious links found in spam email any longer – just visiting a web page laced with malicious code will do the job. You may not even see any telltale signs, like slowed performance, if your PC gets infected with a Trojan these days – like high blood pressure, they tend to do their damage silently.
It’s equally easy for your PC to be stealthily recruited into a criminal botnet – a network of computers hijacked and controlled by cyber villains – without you noticing. Often, the first sign you’ll have that this has happened is discovering that your bank account has been emptied or your identity stolen.
With over 100,000 new Trojans being created every day, it’s become reckless in the extreme to go surfing without adequate computer protection today.

Not so long ago, you were vulnerable to cyber attack only if you visited “bad” sites, like those offering pirated software or “adult” material. Today, however, as ordinary websites have evolved in complexity, securing them has also become hugely more convoluted. Big corporations may have the resources to do this, but your children’s school or the local take away vendor probably don’t. And it tends to be the smaller, less well-protected sites that cyber criminals target, exploiting security weaknesses to furtively install malicious code which then infects unsuspecting visitors.
But it’s not only websites which have evolved in intricacy– so, too, have our PCs. In particular, the web browsers we use to navigate our way around the Web are vastly more multifaceted than those of yesteryear, featuring large numbers of moving parts such as plug-ins so that we can interact fully with the sites we visit, like watching movies and reading PDF documents. Whilst this has undoubtedly brought with it major improvements in the quality of Web experience, it has also brought a greater number of vulnerabilities – glitches or holes in security through which cyber villains can infiltrate their malware. Even though browser vendors regularly release updates to “patch” these vulnerabilities when they’re detected, many users seem oblivious to the need to use only the most recent browsers and keep them regularly updated.
Strong computer virus protection products like Norton Antivirus and internet security tools like Norton Internet Security 2011 can hugely increase your security when browsing. A feature included on Norton 360 goes even further – Norton Browser Protection keeps a virtual eye on your browser, sitting inside it and watching every Web page you visit for signs of malicious code. It filters only the part of the page which has been contaminated by malicious code, so if you’re visiting your child’s school site, you can still interact with the “safe” portions.

No matter how private you feel when you’re surfing the web at home or in your office, there’s no getting away from the fact that others can see you. Not actually your physical self, sitting there with a donut and coffee, but your computer activity.

For one thing, your PC has information gateways known as ports which exchange information between the machine and the internet. Each port has a number (Web traffic goes through port 80, for instance, and email through port 25). Every time you go online, these ports are visible – which means that those with malicious intentions can exploit them. Cyber thieves scan the net looking for open ports on connected PCs, looking for “holes” through which they can slip malicious code onto your computer. They’ll also be taking note of your IP address – your computer’s unique numerical identifier, a bit like a phone number – keeping track of your activity.

If this disturbs you, and it should, there’s a solution. Internet security tools like Norton Internet Security 2010 will powerfully shield your PC and its open ports from cyber crooks, whilst allowing authorized traffic through. It also protects against spyware – programs which sneak through your open ports and secretly collect information about your surfing habits, before sending your profile off to their publishers.

You can also reduce the effects of unwanted tracking of your IP address by contacting your ISP and making sure that you don’t have a static address – a dynamically generated one is much harder for scammers to keep up with.

You might think that a digital certificate is proof that a file is safe to open. If so, take note of a discovery recently made by IT security researcher, Mila Parkour. Parkour came across booby-trapped PDF files contained in emails which used a stolen digital certificate to throw users off the scent. The scam managed to get under the radar of Microsoft’s recent defensive protections for Windows, and even several anti virus programs.
The malware-laden PDF files had been sent to targeted individuals and company employees and contained three different font packages, ensuring that they’d work on a broad range of Adobe programs. Malicious files were used to remotely hijack users’ computers without their knowledge.
Adobe moved swiftly to patch the vulnerabilities in its Reader document viewer which let this latest attack in. There were 23 in all, 18 of which permitted the computer hijacking to take place. One of the vulnerabilities was identified in code linked with Adobe’s Flash Player, which is embedded in Acrobat and Reader – cyber gangsters had been exploiting the flaw until Adobe eradicated it, although there is no evidence that the company’s PDF software has been targeted.
It’s a sign of Adobe’s success and popularity that the company is now estimated to be the second most attacked software producer in the world (Microsoft is the first). Adobe has been the target of around a dozen significant attacks in the last few years and it’s about to include a newly designed sandbox in the next major release of its application (“Adobe Reader Protected Mode”). Had this been available previously, absolutely none of the attacks made on Reader would have succeeded.
These attacks are yet another salutary warning that using a computer without installing internet security tools or computer virus protection is courting peril.

Whilst it’s essential to ensure you have sound computer virus protection on your PC, you may well find that sooner or later, even if you’ve got award-wining products like Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security 2010 guarding your machine, it starts to slow down. Whilst this is often a sign of a malware infection, it needn’t necessarily be so – typically, the older your PC gets, the more likely it is to be running background programs installed completely legitimately by companies like Adobe, Google, Microsoft and Apple. Antivirus software isn’t meant to shield you from these!
If you don’t want to buy a new PC or install a different OS like Linux, there are a few steps you can take to speed things up. After you’ve given it a thorough debugging with your anti virus program, uninstall all previous copies of Java and install the latest one. You should also ditch any software you no longer use.
You can also check your hard disk for errors by clicking on “Start”, going to the “Run” box, and typing “chkdsk/r.” This is a Microsoft tool which inspects your computer disk, automatically repairing defects caused by power failures, system crashes, freezes, or incorrectly turning off the PC. It’s also worth defragmenting your hard drive.
Last but not least, never underestimate the effects of dust. Older PCs suck up quite a lot of the stuff over time, and every now and then a spring clean is necessary. Turn your PC off, unplug it from the mains, remove the casing and very gently blow the stuff out (you should wear an electrostatic discharge strap when you do this to prevent static electricity from zapping your chips). And in no circumstances risk touching the motherboard.
These steps should spruce up your PC’s performance.

With around two billion people worldwide using the internet regularly, communication of all sorts has proliferated – including, sadly, that of a most unwelcome kind: cyber crime. And one of the most prominent features of cyber crime today is its devious posturing, wherein malware frequently masquerades as a useful service.
Don DeBolt, Director of Threat Research at the internet security firm CA Technologies, is under no illusions that organized cyber gangs are now turning to the widespread use of a service model to disseminate their malicious files. This tactic makes detection more difficult, which is perhaps why criminals have chosen it.
It will often take the form of phony security software – “scareware” as it’s become known. Typically, this malware displays alarming but entirely fake alerts once installed with the aim of panicking users into paying for an equally bogus service or anti virus product. However, this isn’t the only form. Crimeware also features heavily in this year’s malware attacks, usually by surreptitiously harvesting personal information and converting infected computers, entirely unbeknown to the user, into a relay station on a criminal botnet. The principal target of these Trojan attacks is personal data, especially banking and financial information.
But malware has spread in many directions using many vehicles for dissemination, including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, spamming through instant messaging and, of course, email. Aside from practical precautions, such as never clicking on links or attachments found in unsolicited emails, not chatting to people you don’t know on instant messaging, and keeping your browser up to date with the latest security patches, the safest way to use the internet is undoubtedly to invest in powerful computer virus protection like Norton Antivirus and internet security tools such as Norton Internet Security 2010.