How to Secure Windows XP by James Hayes
New PCs are usually more vulnerable to Internet and e-mail attacks. Before you
connect your new system to the Internet, make sure that it is adequately
protected with a firewall and that all windows updates and patches have been
downloaded and installed. If you're using a home DSL connection, then some
basic firewall capabilities should allready be provided by your DSL router.
It would, however, be safer if you also had a software firewall installed, just
in case. Software firewalls can also protect from malicious software that may
be operating on your PC, by preventing or at least limiting the communications
these spyware programs may have with the outside world (e.g. sending data with
your passwords or credit card numbers). Windows XP do come with a built-in
firewall, and you should make sure that it is enabled, until you are able to
obtain a better firewall product. Before Service Pack 2, windows had was was
called the "Internet Connection Firewall" which was renamed to "Windows
Firewall" after SP2. Windows Firewall is a lot better than the Internet
Connection Firewall, but it still only provides protection from inbound
traffic, which means that it won't stop a spyware program from sending data
about your activities to it's creator. So, what you really need is an
inbound/outbound firewall such as ZoneAlarm Pro.
Even if you have a firewall, however, you are not completely home free. You can
still be attacked by e-mail viruses or web pages that exploit security holes in
web browsers. To be safe, it's better if you first install an anti-virus suite
and download the latest virus updates, before you start surfing the web. Notice
that you should first download all updates and then start surfing the web. If
your virus definition database is not updated with the latest viruses, this
means that you can get infected and your anti-virus program won't even know
something is wrong! The same is true for Adware and Spyware. In fact, these
programs are effectively viruses with a different function. Don't get confused
and think that anti-virus programs can detect and remove them though. You need
to have one, possibly two anti-spyware programs installed in order to be truly
safe.
Apart from using programs to protect your PC, there are some things you can do
on your own. Windows XP allow two types of system access. Administrator access
and limited access. System administrators can do pretty much everything to a
PC. If you are infected with spyware, the spyware programs will run with
administrator priviledges on the system. If on the other hand you access the
system as a regular user (limited access) then spyware programs or viruses will
only have limited access to your system. In fact, it may not even be possible
for certain malicious programs to install themselves or other programs on your
system, due to the limited access they will have. You can set up different user
accounts from Control Panel - User Accounts. If limited system access causes
problems for some of your applications, such as games, you can set these
applications to run with the credentials of an administrators. Since you
explicitly declare that on a per-application level, there is no danger of a
spyware program or virus getting hold of administrator credentials. You can do
this by right-clicking on the application's shortcut and selecting properties -
advanced - run with different credentials. Bear in mind that you should do this
on the application shortcut located on your desktop (so that changes will be
local) and not on the application executable located in the program files
folder. You should also use the system restore utility of Windows XP, to
restore the system to a previous point of known safe functionality, should you
get infected with viruses or malware and are unable to remove them.
As a final note, beware of naming conventions used by malware and viruses to try
to fool you into opening and executing files. Unfortunately, windows tend to
hide the extensions of known file types. So, if a file is named picture.jpg.exe
windows will only show picture.jpg as a file name. While you might think that
this is a JPEG picture and double-click on it to view the picture, this file is
in fact an executable (.exe extension) which will run when you double click on
it, and instead of a pretty picture, you get all the latest spyware on your PC.
You might want to watch the icon next to file names, to make sure that it
indeed corresponds to what the file claims to be (e.g. a picture) or disable
the "hide extensions for known file types" options from the file manager.
About the Author
James Hayes maintains the Anti
Spyware Review page of InfoCastPortal
