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Securing Your Computer with Free Virus Scan; Free Spyware Scanners; Security tools

Should you be afraid? YES!

What most people don't realize is how their own computers are being used by bad guys. In short, the bad guys put a small hidden program on your computer and they then "own" your computer. But rather than break it, they do something far worse. They allow you to continue using it and it appears that nothing is amis while they hide in the background sending out spam, hiding porn files, stealing your identity information, even communicating among terrorist networks right there in your home or office. All without so much as a hint to computer owner that it's going on.

Ever wonder where all that spam is coming from? It used to be from exploited hosting company (we've caught dozens of them trying to use new accounts on our servers over the years). Now however, it's very likely from the computers of innocent people like you and me.

The following are some common sense recommendations that will help you secure your computer.

Below are free tools for you to use to protect your computer. No computer security would be complete without several layers of protection. Some companies sell "security suites" but no security suite is great at everything. To secure our office systems we use individual products or multiple products that target similar vulnerabilities.

At minimum, your computer should current and updated programs that do the following:

1. Anti-virus protection
2. Firewall that checks incoming and outgoing communications
3. Anti-spyware. This is one area where using more than one product is a good idea.
4. Secure browser - Internet Explorer has earned a solid reputation for poor security.

To that end we offer you the following free security products that you can use today. We are not affiliated with any of these companies and are not compensated by them in any way.

Scan your computer for spyware and visuses for free

Trend Micro, a leader in computer security, provides a nice little tool called "HouseCall that allows you to scan for visuses on your computer for free. Simply click the link below to get started. Panda Software offers a good online scanner for your computer. They claim to provide hassle-free protection against viruses, spyware, hackers, spam and other internet threats. McAfee Stinger is a very nice small program that can be downloaded and run. It doesn't have all the features of major virus scanning programs but it's always updated to protect against the top virus threats. AVG Virus protection software is a really nice product. AVG is kind enough to provide a free version as well as their paid version. For the free version, please respect their license requirements. Spybot and Ad-Aware are "good" products for getting some additional protection against spyware. However, for our money, the commercial software Spyware Doctor and Spysweeper are strong recommendations (see below).     Commercial Products that We Recommend Zonelabs provides a great free and commercial version of their firewall softare called Zonealarm. We highly recommend that you try the free version which will be perfect for most users and upgrade to any of their commercial software if the need arises. Spyware Doctor and SpySweeper are the best of the breed when it comes to Spyware protection. No recommendation would be fair without suggesting that you use a good browser that is known for security. We recommend Firefox for just that reason.

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