Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Am I Secure - Really ?

One of the colleague was talking to me on security of home computer he has, this becomes a more important topic with all those spy wares, trojans , bots and rootkits out there. Hmm, going back to the discussion with him, i found I'm bit more secure than his setup, but I'd be foolish to think i kept all doors locked, this brings up question, Am I Secure - Really ???

Here is my setup in what i have,

Firewall. No questions, everyone needs it, not that dumb WinXP firewall (looks like finally MSFT ships Vista with decent firewall features). I finally threw out the popular but most resource hogging security suite to a simple firewall, which provides blocking any incoming connection and outgoing connection (all except configured apps) . Firewall also includes Network and Host based Intrusion prevention system.

Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware. In future should be a standard OS feature, still this is more of a after-the-fact solution with signature based detection. Check out a interesting rootkit demo at TechNet Webcast.

Anti-Phishing. This I'm dead serious about, if anti virus takes me down, i may have to
spend some hours cleaning up or re-installing, But i don't want to lose out my bank acct information and i know I'm really screwed by that time. On top of Firefox 2.0 and google toolbar anti-phishing features, i run Netcraft to make sure the bank site I'm accessing is not hosted from Russia or Taiwan. I use a PG open source app to store my sensitive and ultra complex online credentials, just to throw another layer on top.
based
Network Security. Home wireless network uses WPA encryption and locked by MAC address. If you like to learn some tips on this, here is a link.

Few years back learnt how easy to write a keylogger, which later transformed to trojan with payload from a file share, though strictly for fun and knowledge, that still keeps me little bit cynical and hence backup-ed data last week. :-)

1 comment:

Natalia said...

Security has now become an important issue for which we take all possible measures to keep our data protected. With the increased use of Internet it is becoming need of hour to safeguard sensitive data from a number of potential risks that may alter or ruin the data completely.
digital signatures