ATTENTION: Internet Security

THIS WAS RECENTLY E-MAILED TO ME BY A FRIEND OF MINE FROM ANOTHER BOARD AND I THOUGHT THAT MOST OF YOU MAY FIND IT AS HELPFUL AS I DID.
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Due to the latent increase of viral and spyware activity on the internet, there are a few tools that everyone should have on hand and using regularly to insure their system stays working in a condition that is usable and user friendly.

McAfee puts out Stinger, a Standalone program that kills most prevelant to date viruses and trojans, such as the ones going around now mydoom@mm and mymail@mm. This can be found, copied to a floppy disc, and run from the floppy at reboot.

http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

A free virus scanner that picks up everything that McAfee, Norton, and PcCiliian does, called AVG can be found at:

http://grisoft.com

Now to the even bigger villian spyware and malware, these can be removed with the regular updating and running of yet another free program called AdWare which can be found here:

www.lavasoftusa.com

Another program to use in conjection with AdAware is Spybot, again this should be updated and run regularly, it can be found at:

www.safer-networking.org

All these programs are FREE forever, no strings attached. They are small enough for even the slowest 14 baud modem to download in under 15 minutes. But none of these programs will do any good if they aren't used on constantly and on a regular basis (weekly, preferred) and these programs are updateable from the program itself once or more weekly.

A bonus note to those connected to the internet for a long time, you may also wish to get a good firewall. ZoneAlarm offers one of the best free firewalls on the net, better than some which you have to pay $50 for. It can be found at:

www.zonelabs.com/store/content/home.jsp

Feel free to tell me off, or whatever you may feel the need to but, with everything that is going on out here on the net, I wouldn't complain if I was offered something that would help me.

I use 2 of those Chosen.

If anyone is on highspeed (cable, dsl) and want extra protection, a good 'hard firewall' is great. SMC (and others) make a good ROUTER which incorporates a such a firewall.

I used one at work and when I tested it, my computer, and the others on the network there were invisible behind it.

Zonealarm is good, but a hard firewall does have its place.

I posted this because I've been getting flooded with virus/worm mail in my secured mail account. I don't know what it is about AOL/CS but I'm not getting any there (thank God). However, I am sometimes getting company emails from companys that I'm not familiar with and they're telling me that an email came from my CS account with the virus.

Believe me, I'm not that brainy to be able to create one and when I ran Norton, nothing showed up. So I figured that it's a prank. But to be safer, I ran a couple of these into my computer and well, so far so good.:)

I've been getting those kind of emails for a while now on my Highstream dialup account. But I never open the emails I delete them immediately. Guess that was a good thing to do.