Software reviews: Symantec Norton Antivirus (2008) – Part 2
The Norton Antivirus program by Symantec is the premier Antivirus program currently available. Symantec, an industry leader in antivirus programs, continues to produce top of the line programs to protect both home computers and business systems with unparalleled quality and ease of use. Norton Antivirus 2008 is the newest release of the program which sets the standard for anitvirus protection.
While some programs claim to remove viruses and protect your system, Norton Antivirus truely delivers. In my personal experience, I have not found another program which even comes close to the protection that Norton Antivirus delivers. I am constantly on-line doing research, checking email and playing games on various websites and in gaming servers where the opportunity for virus infection runs rampant. In the last 3 months of use, Norton Antivirus has stopped and/or removed almost 74,000 items ranging from viruses to phishing programs and spy-ware. In conjunction with live-update options, the program never goes out of date and all the definitions needed to run the programs are constantly updated and renewed to ensure the most up to date program on the market. Another great aspect of Norton Antivirus is the ability to schedule system scans when wanted or needed. If you feel you may have been infected, running a scan is as easy as clicking on the Norton icon in your task bar and starting the scan. You have the option of a quick scan or a full system scan. You can include all floppy disks in the system as well as drives, folders, files and removable drives. These kinds of options are great for computer users who have zip drives for file backup and removable drives such as external hard drives and USB plug and play “flash” drives. Simply plug in the removable drives you have and Norton Antivirus will scan them all and keep your system completely protected. Norton Antivirus also keeps tabs on your on-line activities and email. Should you enter a site where viruses are present, Norton Antivirus will stop them from infecting your system. It will also scan outgoing and incoming emails to ensure you don’t open a virus attached to or embedded in an email. Should you forget to run the scan on your own, Norton Antivirus will automatically run a scan for you. Norton Antivirus is the only program I have seen and/or used that includes a link to the Windows Update page. This is a great feature which allows you to always ensure your system is up to date with Microsoft
Reviews of Windows Vista
Vista integrated some “great” new software to improve the security of the people that paid about $500 for the DVD but how reliable are those new security tools?
My computer security lights are green all the time and I am sure your lights are always green too. Windows Vista has installed by default an anti spyware, a firewall and malicious software removal tools, the only thing it lacks is the antivirus that you have to get somewhere else.
Windows Firewall job is to make sure your computer only accepts connections form trustworthy places and to block all the connection to place and from places that do not do any good to any machine. It just so happens that Windows Firewall never asks the user if he wants to give permission to a particular program to access the internet, it gives full access to all programs even from those that will just send information about you to God knows where. Windows Firewall is not a reliable one, it never was and probably will never be. Any alternatives? Zone Alarm Firewall was the best free firewall you could install in your machine but now it has so many holes and problems that you’d better pick a competitor. For example, if you use Zone Alarm with Windows XP, Google Desktop doesn’t work, but if you shut the firewall Google Desktop will work properly! If you want to play computer games even offline you have to shut it down too, even to see a movie, because the firewall uses so much CPU that you see the movie and the game at less than 10 FPS. A good alternative is Comodo Firewall. It’s called Comodo Internet Security and comes with the firewall plus an antivirus. The programs install itself easily and quickly and you don’t even need to configure anything, it does it all by itself. The firewall asks you permission to allow or deny access to every program that tries to access the internet. The antivirus is very slow but proves to be very useful. However there are better antivirus than this one specially about speed. If your hard disk is big and full it can take some days to search it all.
The next security light is the spyware. Windows already has a very good anti spyware tool called Windows Defender that says all the time “The computer is running normally. No malicious software was detected”. The problem is the computer is not running normally and only thanks to more powerful tools like Spy Sweeper we can trully know if our computers are running normally. Most of the times Spy Sweeper can act even before any bad software starts the execution but even if your computer gets infected this program will heal it instantly. Just don’t trust Windows security tools for God’s sake.
Finally you need a very good antivirus. Windows does not bring one by default thank God and the only solution is getting one from the Internet. I used to have AVG free edition but I just removed it and you should do the same. Comodo antivirus is much more effective dispite of all slowness. If you want a faster antivirus I recommend you to get Avast Home.
Note: Do never try Norton 360 Security Tool. It has a 15 day free trial so many people can try it. The only problem is your computer stays so slow and so buggy and crashes so many times that you’d better unistall it quickly not to lose anything. Imagine you are writting a big document and the Autosave feature is not active and suddenly Norton inspects the computer and then BANG! You just lost 3 hours of work.
To make a long sentence short: Antivirus is either Comodo or Avast Free, Anti Spyware is Spy Sweeper or maybe Lavasoft Adware and finally for a firewall get Comodo Firewall that comes integreated with the antivirus too.
Free Anti-spam Software: Tips for Stopping Spam for Free
Unsolicited email, known widely as spam, is a terrible inconvenience most Internet surfers face on a daily basis. Nowadays, its pretty easy to assume that there are more spam mails sent daily than real email messages worldwide.
Did you know that spam email could be more than just annoying? It can be downright dangerous to your financial and personal identity. Did you know that email spam is the top choice to steal information that is used today by Cyber-criminals and other organized online criminals.
How do they do this? It’s quite simple really. The spam messages they send are called phishing emails. The emails often appear to be legitimate messages from companies you conduct business with. It could be your bank, your school, a credit card company or some other website.
In the message, the cyber-criminal will state that you need to verify your account information. The message you receive will most likely include a link to a website that looks like a real website. The problem is that it is not. The website they send you to is nothing more than a data-harvesting website where they attempt to get you to outright give them your bank account numbers, social security number, credit card number, website passwords and other sensitive data.
How can you prevent this from happening to you? One simple step is to use spam filtering or blocking software in your email inbox. Now we are going to talk about the options you have for downloading free spam blockers and other software that will attempt to prevent spam from appearing in your inbox for FREE.
The first option is to use Google’s GMail, Microsoft Hotmail or Yahoo Mail as your email client. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft spend tens of millions of dollars each year developing spam blocking technology and you benefit from it for free with your account. All three of these providers offer POP3 email functionality, which means you can download other email into your webmail and use the spam filtering software to weed out spam messages, phishing emails and other unwanted mail.
If you prefer to use a POP3 email client on your computer, such as Outlook, Eudora or Windows Mail, you may want to consider a program like SpamFighter, POPFile or SpamPal. These are just a few examples.
These programs attach onto your email client and test each email that arrives in your email box. Questionable emails are normally delegated to a spam folder and outright dangerous emails can be deleted automatically if you choose.
The software use blacklist data and other features to weedout spam emails and determine legitimate messages. Sometimes legitimate messages will be flagged as spam, but you can setup rules to prevent this from happening again.
Although today there is no perfect spam prevention or anti-spam software on the market, using the techniques outlined here will go a long way in cutting down on the number of spam messages in your inbox each day.
How to fight spam in your mail – Part 4
Spam does not refer to the tasty little meat-like product but to the unwanted, excessive advertising emails that flood millions of in-boxes every day. What once used to be an issue that no one could have foreseen when the first concept of e-mail was created in the 1960’s has grown into an e-pedimic that has caused many users to accidentally delete wanted e-mails in a frustrated effort to delete the thousands of spam messages in their in-box. How do you fight this unwanted threat to your POP livelihood? Well, luckily, e-mail providers are right alongside the users who hate spam so they have given a few tools to help you combat this ongoing issue.
1. The Spam Folder is your friend, not just there for show. Most e-mail providers nowadays have a spam folder that is supposed to capture all unwanted spam, but this will not work effectively unless you actively set your spam filters to the maximum settings. Usually this option is found in the “Options” or “Settings” area of any e-mail provider and will assist you with sorting out the known spam. For the unknown spam, however, they will always get through.
2. Unsubscribe to any e-mails that you may not want anymore. With many websites, there is a newsletter option that most people forget to uncheck when registering. This gives those websites the option to send you many types of e-mails that you may not want. Often, there is an unsubscribe option on the bottom of spam that will allow you to not receive that email anymore. It may take a lot of time but unsubscribe as they often will comply and not send you e-mails anymore. Unfortunately, there are some spam that only send more e-mails when you unsubscribe so be cautious.
3. Using message filters is a great way to siphon your wanted e-mails to different folders so you can not only organize your content, but also identify the e-mails that you do not want. Sadly, most e-mails providers have a limit on how many filters you can have. Check the options or settings section of your e-mail provider to see how many filters you can set up. The best filter for personal emails is a sender filter which sorts content based on the email. The worst is a body filter which sorts emails by keywords that are inside the e-mail itself.
4. Realize that the e-mail providers are doing as much as they can to stop spam. Be patient and research the privacy policies so you are informed in what exactly your e-mail provider is doing. Like viruses and spyware, new spam is being created and distributed every day so even though they can guard against the spam they know about, they can’t know about them all, so use the “Report Spam” option if available to assist.
The fight against spam in your email is one that may never be won but by using these methods, the load of spam can be lessened considerably.
How to fight spam – Part 11
Spam email is not only annoying but, in many cases, very costly. Large companies employ people whose fulltime job is to delete spam emails. There are a number of ways that the average person can reduce spam but if you need to accept unsolicited emails for any reason – for instance, because they might be from potential customers – eliminating spam altogether is at this point rather a forlorn hope. Every method so far known to eliminate spam esposes its users to other risks, eg, that you may miss mail that you do want to receive.
It’s been said that the best way to stop spam is for stupid people to stop opening spam attachments or answering these letters. Nice thought … but it would be even tougher to eliminate all the stupid people – some of who really believe that, for instance, some dying African dictator is going to send them millions for helping them to get his money out of the country – than to eliminate all the spam. Just ask P.T. Barnum!
There has been talk of instituting strict legislation including severe sentences for offenders who are caught sending spam. Either such legislation as has been enacted is poorly policed or has not been enforced to any significant degree. It seems that the best hope of fighting this problem will come when (a)technological improvements make it easier to detect the sources of spam and (b)the problem becomes severe enough that both large companies and private individuals clamor and lobby for tougher laws, heavier punishments and more effective enforcement. Once a significant number of people are caught and sentenced to long jail terms and/or massive fines – particularly if such laws are enacted all over the world – a significant number of would be spammers will drop out of the game. There seems to be little doubt that it will end up costing us all more somehow, as stricter security measures in any area inevitably do. Still, it may be worth it. Did we really think we would have free email forever?
Personally, it wouldn’t break my heart to see spammers get five to ten years in jail. Maybe we could put them all in striped shirts and put them to work deleting spam somewhere. Five years, day after day, deleting solicitations for V%!gra! Cruel and unusual punishment? Spammers deserve it. Write to your congressman today – and hope that his anti-spam filter doesn’t delete your letter!
Software reviews: Symantec Norton Antivirus (2008) – Part 9
I downloaded this software in January 2008. My Internet usage consists of daily email reading and surfing a variety of Internet websites. Email reading takes an excellent antivirus program. Many viruses are out there trailing along with unsuspecting emails. Often close friends are sending me emails that contain viruses and they are not even aware. When these emails come through with attachments, my Norton Anti virus goes to work immediately scanning the attachment before allowing me to go forward and open it. This feature alone has saved me hours of problems.
In addition to great antivirus protection, Norton give me regular updates to the software throughout the year. Usually when I sign on, it will update in the background. Updates are for antivirus and spyware protection. Additionally, Norton supplies me with an inbound and intrusion protection firewall as well as phishing protection. Phishing protection is to protect me from fraudulent websites attempting to get personal and private information. I use and internet bank (paypal) and have been contacted by phishing websites frequently. The Norton antivirus warns me of possible phishing whenever a site similar to this contacts me. Claiming to be from a legitimate institution, phishers send phony emails with Web links, requesting personal information or directing the recipient to a fake Web site.
Pharming is a rare form of phishing in which users are directed to a fake Web site where personal information is then requested.How it works: Criminals successfully reroute victims who are typing in legitimate Web addresses to fraudulent sites designed to steal personal information. Norton provides me with an icon in the tray of my desktop with a green check mark to let me know that everything is up and running as normal.
I have used Norton Antivirus for over five years and highly recommend this company and product. Last year I totally lost everything in my computer, due to a hardware issue. After replacing the hardware, I began the long and arduous task of replacing software. Thankfully the Norton was not one of the difficult to replace. They had me up and running quicker than anyone and I was back with peace of mind quickly.
Norton Antivirus will run a regular scan to assure nothing unwanted has come in through other websites or downloads that I do through normal online activity. Today alone I visited over a dozen websites before I came to Helium to write this article. I keep three email addresses and they are
How Can We Put An End To Spam?
I receive approximately 5,000 emails containing spam each and every day. Well, maybe not that many, but it sure seems like it. Spam is spiraling out of control and shows no signs of stopping. The question is, where does spam come from, and can you do anything about it?
Most of the spam I receive in my inbox is sexually explicit, but I still like to look at it because some of this junk is actually quite entertaining. My personal favorites are offers to purchase discounted Canadian Viagra, ads for pornographic websites, and bogus work-from-home programs.
How do these people get their grimy hands on your email address? One way they can get it is through opt-in email. When you order something online, as part of the subscription or service that you signed up for, you may have inadvertently agreed to receive offers via email from that company in the future.
As a result, said company adds you to their mailing list and begins to send you email. This is perfectly legal as long as the company provides you with a way to unsubscribe from their mailing list. If they do not provide you with a means to unsubscribe, then the emails they are sending you are considered spam.
To make matters worse, a spammer will sell your email address and any other information you submitted to them to hundreds or even thousands of other companies who are looking for leads. Before you know it, your email address has been circulated everywhere. Once this happens, there is almost no way to prevent spam from reaching your inbox.
Another common way your email address can end up on a mailing list is when an internet marketer purchases a list of email addresses from someone else, and then sends a joke or an interesting cartoon to everyone on that list and asks you to forward it along to all your friends and relatives.
Once you forward the message, the email has a program attached to it that will copy the list of addresses that the message has been forwarded to and send that list back to the person who originally sent you the email. So now, that person not only has your email address, but also has the email address of everyone you forwarded the message to.
Another popular technique is known as harvesting. This is accomplished by writing a simple retrieval program that searches through every web site listed on a search engine for a certain keyword, and then grabs any any email addresses that are posted on those sites, and subsequently sends them back to the harvester. Using this technology, it is possible to acquire thousands of email addresses in an hour or less.
Harvesting has become a legal dilemma. The email marketing community feels that they should be allowed to harvest email addresses that are posted on public websites. In their opinion, if someone has posted their email address for all to see, then other people have the right to contact that person and ask them questions or send them offers.
However, web sites where email addresses are posted have threatened legal action against anyone that harvests email addresses from their site and uses them to build spam lists. Unfortunately, these web sites really have no way to prevent this, and it will only get worse in the future.
We will never stop spam completely. Both big businesses and small businesses have a strong incentive to send bulk email, because it costs nothing, and is a valuable tool for increasing their customer base. Sending regular mail or hiring a telemarketer costs a lot of money and is extremely ineffective. As a result, most companies would prefer to send massive amounts of email. So, expect your inbox to be chock full of spam for many years to come.
What Is Spam?
So the question what is spam or spamming as its also know as, there are so many different definitions on what spam actually is so I will list a fee so you can make your own mind up:
· Junk email which is usually unsolicited – sending a mass of emails from commercial sites to people who haven’t ask for the email and also emails sent to annoy or harass the receiver which may include crashing their computer.
· Unsolicited email – advertising a product and or service, which will overload the receiver’s computer which will slow the computer down.
· The using of mailing lists – to blanket online groups, private email boxes with indiscrimination, unsolicited messages of a promotional nature.
· An activity – that tricks search engines into giving their site a higher ranking on searches via hiding keywords and submitting webpage’s daily to the search engine.
· Ian an inappropriate attempt to – send emails and use emails to send the same email message to numerous people who didn’t ask for the information as well as other network communications.
Spam emails has got worse over the last few years in 2001 only 8% of emails sent worldwide were spam at the end of this year 2007 50% of all emails sent will be spam. If you have a company website this is likely to get worse, as spam emails will come through your business email address.
Spam cannot only cause you the inconvenience in having to delete them all, it can crash your computer, overload your email account stopping you from receiving and sending other emails but also time and money lost. Money can be lost by stopping you from receiving important emails and also by the time colleagues spend deleting and filtering spam emails, which will stop them from doing their normal job. Worms and viruses may also be included in spam emails, which can destroy data and your system information
There are ways of filtering spam emails with the use of anti spam software and spam filtering software. There are free packages available on the Internet to help you protect your home computer and your email accounts but if you are a business looking for anti spam and spam filtering software your best bet is to look into the many companies selling specially designed packages for businesses.
There isn’t a complete cure for spam but anti spam and spam-filtering software can help your spam emails reduce but you will always get a few that filter through to your inbox. There are other ways to minimize your spam including: -
· Don’t use your personal email account when you sign up to newsgroups, forums, mailing lists etc.
· Use web filters to filter out your spam.
· Don’t click on any links that are in spam emails, don’t give them any of your personal information and don’t buy anything from them.
· If you have a website remove your email address from the website, this can be done by using a form to do with validation.
How to detect and avoid Internet scams
There are many scams that are being presented to many unaware users everyday. For many people who have not had many experiences on the Internet will have some difficulty in spotting the real programs from the ones that are Scams.
There are many ways to avoid and detect Internet scams, but it surely does need some experience too. As it works in real life too, “Experience is the best teacher”. I myself have had some experiences with Scams. I once found out about an online company that promised me that I would get paid to surf, but to my disappointment I not only found that they do not pay, but I also found out that a software that I was suppossed to download in order to earn was spyware (was some kind of a trojan horse).
Now, probably I know many of you must have heard about some online schemes that promise the user really huge benefits. What I feel about this is that programs that promise too much are usually scams. What I recommend all of you to do when you have any doubts about any online scheme or program that you would like to join, is to do a google search or as some people say it “google it”. Most of the time (at-least whenever I did it) it always showed me if it was trustworthy. For example, when I was first going to join helium, I did a google search and I saw that Helium is trustworthy. Just like that I have done it with many other programs that I have joined and been happy ever since I did so.
Some of the scams that are on the Internet are really obvious but some are very difficult to “grasp”. The ones that really easy to grasp are the ones that clearly shows that it’s too unbelievable. But the ones that are difficult to find out need to tried out. For example, I did try out a program that promised me to pay me to search but I had 30$ and I still haven’t been paid. It’s been two months now but I’m still waiting. I did search about this program on google but there wasn’t much complaints when I joined the program. So, what I’m trying to say is that not always will the “google search method” work. But it’s better than not having any way to find out something about an online program.
But that not the only way to detect scam, one more way I know is with the help of an Anti-virus software called “McAfee”. I think you all would have probably heard about this Software. It’s as famous as Norton but it has many more features like wireless network protection, site adviser and so on. When you install this software (unfortunately it is not free, but it’s worth it) you will also have McAfee site adviser integrated with Internet Explorer (Obviously for windows XP). This is something really useful because now any scam sites or sites that are having a high risk level will be indicated by the McAfee site adviser. This is probably done by using a list of sites that the Mcafee company provides, thus, it is something that can be trusted.
From above I hope that all of you have found the above mentioned methods effective in the fight against Internet scams.
A Quick Antivirus Software Guide
Anti-Virus software has become more and more of a necessity in this broadband age. Most of our computers are constantly connected to the internet making them very vulnerable to attack from viruses and spyware. If you don’t use antivirus software now is the time to look for some.
Once installed, the software will be able to keep itself updated to all new threats & scan your computer to find the infected files. It will then either delete the files or quarantine them so they don’t infect the rest of your computer. The software will also keep check of all new incoming files making sure no viruses get into your system.
Some may think Anti-virus software is expensive, and for people on a budget it can be. Although there is a number of free packages available across the internet. These obviously aren’t as good As the more dominant software (MacAfee, Norton etc) but some do the job. A good site to find out about different packages I have come across is www.notgettingscammed.co.uk/antivirus. it also highlights different aspects of antivirus software. Check it out before buying or upgrading your software.
Ultimately in this day and age you need good antivirus software installed in your computer. The money you will pay will definitely be worth it and could well stop your computer being infected to the point of no return. Although most antivirus software updates itself you must also remember to check that it is doing so. Some may occasionally need updating manually.
Remember to check out www.notgettingscammed.co.uk/antivirus for free guides, reviews & information on software, viruses, spyware and more.
