Archive for the 'Security' Category

Not Everything You Accidentlly Delete is Lost.

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

Have you ever deleted something and emptied your Recycle Bin and become overwhelmed by the sense of “Ohhh nooooo, I just didn’t do that” and realized you deleted something fairly precious to you. Well if you’re one of those people or know someone who has then offer them this miraculous piece of software.

It’s called PC Inspector File Recovery, provided by CONVAR – Die Datenretterâ„¢, and it’s capable of scanning your hard drives for files that had once thought to have been deleted. It’s totally free as is all their other products and they leave it to you to donate to them. This can be a life saver to just about anyone. If you’re a system admin and accidently delete your file allocation tables for those databases you can recover them. You delete those last remaining digital photos of your important ones then there’s a chance you can recover those too.

Just keep in mind the sooner you use the program the less likely those files get written over and the greater the chance you’ll have of recovering them. There are other file recovery tools but this one beats them out because it’s free and it’s an all around nice application.

PC Inspecter

Another Step in Protecting Youself Online.

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

I recently posted an article about protecting yourself online using a firewall. Well in the spirit of securing your pc I’ll give you a few more good tips to help you cope with the ever expanding and malicious Internet.

Having a firewall is a good way to protect yourself in terms of being attacked by people from the web but sometimes you are your own worste enemy, or those other individuals who use your computer at home. All it takes is one mouse click and your computer could be infected with a malicious piece of software that will take over your computer and make your life on the web a nightmare.

Malware will disable your pc or personal computer and make you vulnerable. Your passwords to important sites could be recorded/read and sent to a website that will let everyone know your personal information. You pc may no longer work because important files that are needed to boot your pc are deleted and security crackers can log onto your machine and install or copy software that was bought and paid for by the owner of the compromised pc.

You can take steps to protect you from these horrors by purchasing or download antivirus software or AVG software. For those who can afford it Norton and McAfee have some very decent software to remove viruses and prevent viruses from infecting your computer in the first place. Both feature real-time protection which means that the programs stays loaded in the background and scans files before you access them for malware. Another free antivirus application is called AntiVir, which is just like Norton and McAfee but doesn’t have all the bells and whisles like Adware/Spyware detection.

In addition to installing antivirus applications you’ll want to install Adware/Spyware detecting and removal software like Ad-Aware and Spybot - Search and Destroy. Both are free and have the same features except Spybot includes a Immunization feature to prevent known Spyware from infecting your personal computer.

The key to all this software is to keep it up-to-date and to scan your computer regularly for any malware. Make sure you have the latest security patches for your operating system by using the update program for you system. And don’t open files from other individuals unless they are trusted and you know they are expecting that file from them. Taking these precautions will only help in protecting your computer. There is no 100% solution to protecting yourself from malware but this is taking your closer to the next best thing.