Spyware & Antivirus Program Reviews

There are many reasons to consider browsing anonymously and through an Anonymous VPN, not just to access porn or log onto Second Life as the opposite gender. It’s your financial information and career that could be at risk.

Consider what would happen if your boss came to know your home IP address and searched the Internet for your postings and online activities by IP address. Or worse yet, if your boss’s competitor, or your competitor tapped into your confidential online business communications.

Owning your own business means you are a primary target for industrial espionage - and most small businesses never think twice about their communications security. The vast majority of espionage, worldwide, is for economic and business data, trade secrets, buying patterns, economic and financial patterns. One ill-advised email that can be traced back to you could sink your company.

With Christmas around the corner, last minute shopping online is inevitable. But are you sure that your credit card or paypal details are safe? It’s highly possible that your credit card details land on a hacker’s hard disk before it reaches the merchant’s bank.

With the growing issue of government intrusion into private affairs, both personal and economic, Personal VPN and anonymous surfing has become even more compelling. Google recently handed over the IP address of a user of its blogging software to an Israeli court after the author was accused of slandering Israeli politicians. Yahoo has been heavily criticized for handing over details about its users to the Chinese authorities that have led to the jailing of three people who criticised the Chinese government online. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first in IT Security’s periodic list of free security tools. Be aware that these are by no means all the anti-virus tools on the market. For example, this list does not include major anti-virus vendors that provide paid individual and enterprise solutions. However, that does not mean that the included anti-virus tools are not worthwhile — the best of them are as good as paid programs. In the interest of listing tools that can help in a moment of crisis, this list only includes tools that can detect, clean, remove or neutralize viruses. There are also tools to scan a local hard drive, as well as those that can accept a single uploaded file and indicate whether it is infected with a virus. Of course, if a file is small, an easy way to check it for a virus is to send it to yourself via a free email service like Yahoo! Mail, Gmail or Hotmail, which scan all file attachments.
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PC on the Internet are constantly attacked with harmful viruses and other malware, and as a result users have antivirus protections in place, including antispam applications for use against the new viruses in your e-mail box. It seems like just when everything appears to be in control, there’s something new that your computer has picked up, perhaps an application running silently in the background to collect reports on the history of your computer use.

The better kinds of ad and spy applications simply monitor your activity for their own information. They’ll track you to the sites you visit in order to gain information about Web surfing trends to better their marketing outreach. Not so bad. But other types of applications go beyond regular tracking and instead watch for patterns in keystrokes to develop possible password possibilities; this could be a real risk to security. So how does one rid themselves of these unscrupulous little programs? It’s often easier to prevent spyware than detect and remove it - at times just attempting to remove these programs can render other share and freeware applications useless.

Below find a list of some steps to take to find and remove spyware applications from your computer system:

* Be careful what you download! If looking for a specific patch or shareware download, it’s often a good idea to use trusted sites. Download.com and tucows.com are some sites with a good reputation.
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