Should really put down IE at all, Since firefox does have just as many exploits as IE has no matter how many firefox addons you got to try and keep you save when browsering the internet.

but anyways.

My rule when browsering or searching for something online, try and use good browsering habits, like going to sites you trust, and once you come across a site you trust just book mark it.

Also clean your cookies, internet history, temp internet files, etc at least once a week..

Don't install more then one anti-spyware an anti-virus software because they well cancel each other out and you won't have the security that you should have. I also recommand having a hardware firewall. aka router

Ophelos said...
"Also clean your cookies, internet history, temp internet files, etc at least once a week.."

Nice useless advice. This will do NOTHING to prevent malicious software from attacking your computer. Cookies CANNOT harm your computer. Cookies are text files. They are not scripts. Internet history and temp internet history should be deleted ONLY if you are interested in hiding what you have done on a computer. It will do NOTHING to prevent malicious software from infesting your computer.

"Don't install more then one anti-spyware an anti-virus software because they well cancel each other out and you won't have the security that you should have."

Really? They cancel each other out. So if I install Norton and McAfee I end up with no protection? What about McAfee and Trend Micro, do they "cancel each other out"? I certainly wouldn't recommend installing more than one anti-virus program, or more than one firewall. If you have two of those, they will interfere with each other, and you are asking for trouble, but they won't "cancel each other out."

Some anti-spyware programs do not play well together. Mostly this is due to their quarantine procedures. If I use Spybot Search and Destroy (a good free tool) and it quarantines a suspect program, a second spyware scan with, say, Adaware, will not know that the Spybot quarantined something, and will give a 2nd hit for the same problem.

I would fully recommend running AT LEAST two anti-spyware scanners. I have yet to see one that finds everything.

*snicker* A router is NOT a hardware firewall. Home routers are usually actually a NAT, which gives the nice side effect of essentially being an inbound firewall... but it is still not a firewall. A true firewall can block outbound connections as well.

And as for running two virus scanners... that'll bog down your system quite nicely. Hope you aren't picky about your FPS.

Adding layers and layers of virus scanners won't help much... the best defense is that thing in your head, use it!

Hey, you forgot SiteAdvisor, which will tell you if the site's malicious in the first place!

problem solved.. i use that all the time

PJ Said : Yeah, install addblock and be unable to use most sites - including some honest wow sites which have been hacked in the past.

No measure of security is going to help you if you don't learn how to use it effectively.

I use Adblock and I have never been denied entry to a site because of it. I'm not saying that such sites don't exist, but as a general rule they aren't worth visiting.

"Yeah, install addblock and be unable to use most sites - including some honest wow sites which have been hacked in the past."

Properly configured, Adblock won't stop you using anything.

"So they can program software to hide on your machine and record and relay your keyboard presses, but not read the text box where your login is - yeah right."

Yeah. Right.

It's easy to intercept keystrokes coming in from a keyboard but difficult to create some software that would scan the screen and recognise exactly where it needs to look, and recognise the characters that are in that area of the screen - which are often masked with asterisks anyway.


It's not a problem that you seem have no idea how technology of this nature works. It's hardly a requisite. But it does make you sound like an idiot when you use your position of ingorance to launch sarcastic attacks against people who are ultimately better informed than you.

"It's easy to intercept keystrokes coming in from a keyboard but difficult to create some software that would scan the screen and recognise exactly where it needs to look, and recognise the characters that are in that area of the screen - which are often masked with asterisks anyway."

Your right, except that that's not the way it's done, what they do is to read the right memory block, which is about as easy to do as reading the keystrokes.

"Passwords sent by your browser are not encrypted and are sent over the internet in plain text format, the only place they are encrypted is in the database of the website you are using."

Except for the vast majority of places where they aren't in the clear. Anytime a page uses SSL - it goes out encrypted. That is, any address that starts with "https:"

This doesn't keyloggers or trojans from grabbing data in another way, but simply sniffing the packets as they go out generally doesn't work.