Friday, December 17, 2004

Help for home users

Home users often seem to be the "forgotten market" when it comes to security. This could be for a variety of reasons, but regardless, in many cases, exploit attempts are traced back to networks populated by home users.

Well, Microsoft has a Security At Home site that may be very beneficial to home users, and perhaps even small business owners. This site has links to information about protecting yourself while shopping online, the first three steps to protecting yourself, information about worms and spyware, etc. It's definitely a good resource.

Also for home users, spyware and adware are a big issue. What do you do? My recommendation has always been to use several anti-spyware tools, rather than relying on a single tool. For example, some good ones I've used are Spybot Search and Destroy, LavaSoft's AdAware, and HiJackThis. Other tools I've heard good things about are SpySweeper and PestPatrol. Now, I've only evaluated the first three tools mentioned, and I've only used them in cases where we've downloaded the tool to the system, installed and updated it and run it...I haven't really taken a look at tools that allow centralized management, something small businesses would be interested in.

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