Why is the computer security important?

Computer security is the process of preventing and detecting unauthorized use of your computer. Prevention measures help you to stop unauthorized users (also known as "intruders") from accessing any part of your computer system. Detection helps you to determine whether or not someone attempted to break into your system, if they were successful, and what they may have done.

We use computers for everything from banking and investing to shopping and communicating with others through email or chat programs. Although you may not consider your communications "top secret," you probably do not want strangers reading your email, using your computer to attack other systems, sending forged email from your computer, or examining personal information stored on your computer (such as financial statements).

Intruders (also referred to as hackers, attackers, or crackers) may not care about your identity. Often they want to gain control of your computer so they can use it to launch attacks on other computer systems.

Having control of your computer gives them the ability to hide their true location as they launch attacks, often against high-profile computer systems such as government or financial systems. Even if you have a computer connected to the Internet only to play the latest games or to send email to friends and family, your computer may be a target.

Intruders may be able to watch all your actions on the computer, or cause damage to your computer by reformatting your hard drive or changing your data.

Unfortunately, intruders are always discovering new vulnerabilities (informally called "holes") to exploit in computer software. The complexity of software makes it increasingly difficult to thoroughly test the security of computer systems.

Also, some software applications have default settings that allow other users to access your computer unless you change the settings to be more secure. Examples include chat programs that let outsiders execute commands on your computer or web browsers that could allow someone to place harmful programs on your computer that run when you click on them.

What is method required for internet security

 1. Use a firewall

We strongly recommend the use of some type of firewall product for Internet security, such as a network appliance or a personal firewall software package. Intruders are constantly scanning home user systems for known vulnerabilities. Network firewalls (whether software or hardware-based) can provide some degree of protection against these attacks.

2. Don't open unknown email attachments

Before opening any email attachments, be sure you know the source of the attachment. It is not enough that the mail originated from an address you recognize. The Melissa virus spread precisely because it originated from a familiar address. Malicious code might be distributed in amusing or enticing programs.
If you must open an attachment before you can verify the source, we suggest the following procedure:

    a. save the file to your hard disk
    b. scan the file using your antivirus software
    c. open the file

For additional protection, you can disconnect or lock your computer's network connection before opening the file.
Following these steps will reduce, but not wholly eliminate, the chance that any malicious code contained in the attachment might spread from your computer to others.

3. Don't run programs of unknown origin

Never run a program unless you know it to be authored by a person or company that you trust. Also, don't send programs of unknown origin to your friends or coworkers simply because they are amusing -- they might contain a Trojan horse program. These programs seriously hurt Internet Security.

4. Disable hidden filename extensions

Windows operating systems contain an option to "Hide file extensions for known file types". The option is enabled by default, but you can disable this option in order to have file extensions displayed by Windows. After disabling this option, there are still some file extensions that, by default, will continue to remain hidden.
There is a registry value which, if set, will cause Windows to hide certain file extensions regardless of user configuration choices elsewhere in the operating system. The "NeverShowExt" registry value is used to hide the extensions for basic Windows file types. For example, the ".LNK" extension associated with Windows shortcuts remains hidden even after a user has turned off the option to hide extensions.

5. Keep all applications, including your operating system, patched

Vendors will usually release patches for their software when a vulnerability has been discovered. Most product documentation offers a method to get updates and patches. You should be able to obtain updates from the vendor's web site. Read the manuals or browse the vendor's web site for more information.
Some applications will automatically check for available updates, and many vendors offer automatic notification of updates via a mailing list. Look on your vendor's web site for information about automatic notification. If no mailing list or other automated notification mechanism is offered you may need to check periodically for updates.

6. Turn off your computer or disconnect from the network when not in use

Turn off your computer or disconnect its Ethernet interface when you are not using it. An intruder cannot attack your computer if it is powered off or otherwise completely disconnected from the network.

7. Disable Java, JavaScript, and ActiveX if possible

Be aware of the risks involved in the use of "mobile code" such as ActiveX, Java, and JavaScript. A malicious web developer may attach a script to something sent to a web site, such as a URL, an element in a form, or a database inquiry. Later, when the web site responds to you, the malicious script is transferred to your browser.
The most significant impact of this vulnerability can be avoided by disabling all scripting languages. Turning off these options will keep you from being vulnerable to malicious scripts. However, it will limit the interaction you can have with some web sites.
Many legitimate sites use scripts running within the browser to add useful features. Disabling scripting may degrade the functionality of these sites.

8. Disable scripting features in email programs

Because many email programs use the same code as web browsers to display HTML, vulnerabilities that affect ActiveX, Java, and JavaScript are often applicable to email as well as web pages. Therefore, in addition to disabling scripting features in web browsers, we recommend that users also disable these features in their email programs. It is important to Internet security.

9. Make regular backups of critical data

Keep a copy of important files on removable media such as ZIP disks or recordable CD-ROM disks (CD-R or CD-RW disks). Use software backup tools if available, and store the backup disks somewhere away from the computer.

10. Make a boot disk in case your computer is damaged or compromised

To aid in recovering from a security breach or hard disk failure, create a boot disk on a floppy disk which will help when recovering a computer after such an event has occurred. Remember, however, you must create this disk before you have a security event.

11. Consult your system support personnel if you work from home
If you use your broadband access to connect to your employer's network via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or other means, your employer may have policies or procedures relating to the security of your home network. Be sure to consult with your employer's support personnel, as appropriate, before following any of the steps outlined in this document.

Home Computer is most wanted target of hacker's

The Your home computer is a popular target for intruders. Why? Because intruders want what you've stored there. They look for credit card numbers, bank account information, and anything else they can find. By stealing that information, intruders can use your money to buy themselves goods and services.
But it's not just money-related information they're after. Intruders also want your computer's resources, meaning your hard disk space, your fast processor, and your Internet connection. They use these resources to attack other computers on the Internet. In fact, the more computers an intruder uses, the harder it is for law enforcement to figure out where the attack is really coming from. If intruders can't be found, they can't be stopped, and they can't be prosecuted.   
Why are intruders paying attention to home computers? Home computers are typically not very secure and are easy to break into. When combined with high-speed Internet connections that are always turned on, intruders can quickly find and then attack home computers. While intruders also attack home computers connected to the Internet through dial-in connections, high-speed connections (cable modems and DSL modems) are a favorite target.
No matter how a home computer is connected to the Internet, intruders' attacks are often successful. Many home computer owners don't realize that they need to pay attention to computer security.
How do intruders break into your computer? In some cases, they send you email with a virus. Reading that email activates the virus, creating an opening that intruders use to enter or access your computer. In other cases, they take advantage of a flaw or weakness in one of your computer's programs - a vulnerability - to gain access.
Once they're on your computer, they often install new programs that let them continue to use your computer - even after you plug the holes they used to get onto your computer in the first place. These backdoors are usually cleverly disguised so that they blend in with the other programs running on your computer.
Whether your computer runs Microsoft? Windows?, Apple's Mac OS, LINUX, or something else, the issues are the same and will remain so as new versions of your system are released. The key is to understand the security-related problems that you need to think about and solve.

HOW YOU CAN IMPROVE A SECURITY OF INTERNET EXPLORER

There is no question that Internet Explorer is the most popular web browser in the world, but with great popularity comes great responsibility. Since one program is used by approximately 75 percent of the world to browse the web, you are forced to deal with the majority of the world’s hackers who are all trying to break down your defenses. Luckily, there are certain things you can do to improve the security of Internet Explorer so you don’t fall victim to the same problems that have already infected millions of computers already.

These days, most Windows Vista systems are set to automatically download updates from the Microsoft website, but for those that aren’t and for those folks still running Windows XP, you need to make a weekly pilgrimage to the Microsoft website via the “Windows Update” feature to download the latest updates that can keep you and your computer safe. As quickly as hackers can discover and exploit a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer, there are teams of Microsoft technicians working hard to close that loophole. It is only with regular updates that you are able to put those fixes to good use. Good Internet Explorer security means staying on top of security updates at all costs.

Next, you can help improve Internet Explorer security by watching where you surf. Part of the fun of the Internet is exploring new websites, but some websites are like traps that wait for Internet Explorer browsers to visit them so that they can try to infiltrate your machine. Your virus protection software should alert you if a website attempts to access your computer or change any of your settings. Your machine may lock up or freeze so that you can’t close the browser window. Once you regain control, run an immediate virus scan and never revisit that website. Many adult websites and hacker/peer-to-peer sharing websites feature these types of traps.

One of the most popular features in web browsers is the ability to add on toolbars and extra features that run along side the stand alone browser. As useful as these programs can be, they are often doorways for other programs to install themselves on your machine. You can download one toolbar and before you know it, you have a dozen different bars installed and you can’t see a thing. If you want to install a toolbar to give Internet Explorer extra functionality, make sure you do some research first to find out which toolbars live up to the hype and which ones are simply gateways to viruses and Trojans. You would be surprised how much you can improve Internet Explorer security by simply watching what add ons you use.

Finally, you can improve Internet Explorer security by simply getting to know the usual behavior of your browser. If you suddenly notice that web pages are taking significantly longer to load than they did a little bit ago, something might be wrong. Get to know what the usual pop up windows that come with your browser look like, so when a website attempts to get you to click on a box, you’ll know if you should or not. When it comes to Internet Explorer security, a good portion of the battle is common sense and not falling for traps set by hackers.

Be careful when reading email with attachments

We’ve all heard stories about people receiving an item in the mail that in some way caused them harm. We’ve heard of letter bombs and exploding packages, and in 2001, we learned about Anthrax-laden letters. Although their frequency is low, they do make news.

These unsolicited items are sent to unsuspecting recipients. They may contain a return address, a provocative envelope, or something else that encourages its receiver to open it.

You probably receive lots of mail each day, much of it unsolicited and containing unfamiliar but plausible return addresses. Some of this mail tells you of a contest that you may have won or the details of a product that you might like. The sender is trying to encourage you to open the letter, read its contents, and interact with them in some way that is financially beneficial – to them. Even today, many of us open letters to learn what we’ve won or what fantastic deal awaits us. Since there are few consequences, there’s no harm in opening them.

Email-borne viruses and worms operate much the same way, except there are consequences, sometimes significant ones. Malicious email often contains a return address of someone we know and often has a provocative Subject line.

Email viruses and worms are fairly common. If you’ve not received one, chances are you will. Here are steps you can use to help you decide what to do with every email message with an attachment that you receive. You should only read a message that passes all of these tests.

1.The Know test: Is the email from someone that you know?

2.The Received test: Have you received email from this sender before?

3.The Expect test: Were you expecting email with an attachment from this sender?

4.The Sense test: Does email from the sender with the contents as described in the Subject line and the name of the attachment(s) make sense? For example, would you expect the sender – let’s say your Mother – to send you an email message with the Subject line “Here you have, ;o)” that contains a message with attachment – let’s say AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs? A message like that probably doesn’t make sense. In fact, it happens to be an instance of the Anna Kournikova worm, and reading it can damage your system.

5.The Virus test: Does this email contain a virus? To determine this, you need to install and use an anti-virus program.

You should apply these five tests to every piece of email with an attachment that you receive. If any test fails, toss that email. If they all pass, then you still need to exercise care and watch for unexpected results as you read it.

The keys for firewall protection

Firewall protection primarily uses packet filtering to detect and block intruders. Some also include application filtering. In addition, these applications typically generate alerts and log intrusion attempts.

Packet Filtering

In packet filtering, the firewall software inspects the header information (source and destination IP addresses and ports) in each incoming and, in some cases, outgoing, TCP/IP packet. Based on this information, the firewall blocks the packet or transmits it. The firewall uses the port information to block idle or nonstandard ports such as a listening port opened by a Trojan horse. In this way, the firewall blocks packets sent from a hacker to the Trojan horse listening port. Increasingly, personal firewalls also block outgoing traffic on these ports. This precludes a Trojan horse from sending outgoing packets.
The firewall protection also uses the port information to block certain types of incoming packets associated with common hacker attacks. For example, hackers use port scanner software to identify target computers for attack. Port scanners “ping” ranges of IP addresses via port 7. If a computer responds to the ping, it becomes a target for further probing for open ports. By default, personal firewall software packages block these incoming pings on port 7 so that the computer does not respond.
Personal firewalls also use the source and destination IP addresses to filter packets. Firewalls can be configured to allow or block packets from specific IP addresses. However, packet filtering is susceptible to “IP spoofing,” which refers to the practice of forging the source IP address in a packet. In this way, a malicious hacker can try to gain entry by spoofing the source IP address. For example, some firewalls will not block a packet if its source and destination IP addresses correspond to IP addresses behind the firewall on the private network. Hackers exploit this vulnerability by forging the source IP address. In another IP spoofing scenario, the source and destination IP addresses are the same; this type of packet will lock up some computers.

Application Filtering

As one important function of firewall protection, Application-level filtering uses higher-layer protocol information to filter traffic and implements additional security and access control services. More typical in enterprise networks, application-level firewalls are implemented as hosts running proxy servers. These proxy servers are used to prevent direct traffic between network peers. Additionally, proxy servers can log and audit network traffic. Many personal firewalls have a basic form of application-level filtering that allows users to specify which applications on the computer may access the Internet.
Some Trojan horse programs may circumvent this filtering by modifying a program that is commonly granted full access to the Internet through a firewall. In this way, the Trojan horse masquerades as a harmless program on the PC, but provides a hacker with access to the PC, in spite of application-level filtering firewalls. Only a personal firewall software package, which also checks programs for unauthorized modifications, can successfully defend a user from this type of attack.

Alerting and Logging

A key feature of any firewall is its ability to alert the user when it detects an “attack,” and to maintain a system log of these events. This allows the user to identify threats and to fine tune the firewall configuration appropriately. A key responsibility of the user is to monitor the logs and take appropriate action when necessary. and assigns “private” IP addresses to each client PC on the LAN. These private addresses are not known outside the LAN on the Internet. All incoming packets arriving at the NAT gateway have the same destination address. The NAT gateway refers to its association mapping table to determine the actual client address and port number for a destination packet and forwards the packet to the correct client. Many of these NAT devices also include additional firewall protection in the form of basic packet filtering. Some NAT implementations also include “stateful” port inspection, in which the firewall monitors the state of the transaction to verify that the destination of an inbound packet matches the source of a previous outbound request. Stateful port inspection helps to prevent denial-of-service attacks (which typically use the UDP transport) that can be mounted using IP address spoofing techniques

How To Trace an Email Address And Original Sender?

Hello Guys Nowadays spamming is the Most common .. Out of the 5 emails you receive 2 are spams... And Out of 5 spam Mails 1 contains Virus or Botnet.. Its hard to believe but its truth... So Today I am Going to share with you HOW TO TRACE THE EMAIL ADDRESS AND ORIGINAL SENDER?? .. So guys Read On.------

1.TRACING AN EMAIL ADDRESS------

The purpose of this guide is to show the process involved in tracing an email. The first step required to tracing an email is finding out the headers of the email. What are headers? Email headers are lines added at the top of an email message that are used by servers as the email goes on route to get delivered. Generally email clients only show the standard To, From, and Subject headers, but there are more.

1) Enabling Email Headers

Enabling Email Headers For Gmail
Step 1:Once Logged into your Gmail Account open the Email whose headers you want to view. Click on the “More Options” link in the message next to the date of the email.

Step 2: Now click the “Show Original” link.

Step 3: This link will popup a new window the headers and the body of the message.

Enabling Email Headers For Hotmail

Step 1:Once logged in, click on the "Options" link in the upper navigation bar.

Step 2: Now click on the "Mail Display Settings" link.

Step 3: Change the "Message Headers" option to "Full" and click ok.

Step 4: Go to your inbox and open any one of your email. You emails show now contain additional headers.

Enabling Email Headers For Yahoo

Step 1:Once logged in, click on the "Options" link in the upper navigation bar.
Step 2: Now click on the "General Preferences" link.
Step 3: In the paragraph titled Messages and locate the "Headers" heading and select "All".
Step 4: Go to your inbox and open any one of your email. You emails show now contain additional headers.
2) Understanding Email Headers
In this example the “Sender” located at sender@exampleuniversity.edu want to send an email to “Receiver” located at receiver@exampleisp.com. The sender composes his email at his workstation in the university’s computer lab (lab.exampleuniversity.edu). Once completed the email message is passed to the university’s mail server called mail.exampleuniversity.com. The mail server seeing that it has a message for receiver@exampleisp.com, contacts someisp.com mail server and delivers the email to it. The email is stored on someisp.com server until Receiver logs on to check his/her inbox.

In this example, four headers will be added to the email message. This first header is generated by email client on lab.exampleuniversity.edu when forwarding it to the mail server at mail.exampleuniversity.edu.
The following header is added when mail.exampleuniversity.edu transmits the message to mail.exampleisp.com.
The following header is added when mail.exampleisp.com stores the message on the server for Reciever.
The following header is added when Reciever downloads the email from home machine called reciever.local.
3) Tracking The Orginal Sender

The easiest way for finding the original sender is by looking for the X-Originating-IP header, this header is important since it tells you the IP Address of the computer that had sent the email. If you can not find the X-Originating-IP header then you will have to sift through the Received headers to find the sender's ip.
Once the email sender's ip is found go to http://www.arin.net/ to begin a search.
Now click on the "NET-24-16-0-0-1" link.
Scroll down the page untill you find the OrgAbuseEmail field.

Remember to include all the headers of the email along with an attached copy when filling a complaint.

I am Not the Original Writer of this Post. I have take It from Security Forums...But I thought It would be Useful So I am Sharing It with you Guys...
IF you have Any Queries Ask Me!

Top 3 Tips For Deploying NETWORK ACCESS CONTROL

A few things you'll need to know before you get started.

1. Explore requirements
Should you really be buying NAC? Jeff Falcon, senior security specialist with solution provider CDW, said customers often lack a clear understanding “as to why they may need, or not need, a NAC solution.” He recommends identifying high-risk and high-value data that needs protection as an initial step. Next, customers may look at network traffic in monitor mode to analyze threats, he added.
2. Pursue policy
Before implementation, organizations would be well advised to focus on creating a comprehensive policy to govern access to networks and applications. Customers “need to spend a lot of time … making sure their security policy asks the right questions,” noted Brendan O’Connell, manager of the product marketing group for Cisco Systems’ NAC Appliance. What software should or shouldn’t be present on an end point device? Which users will or won’t have access to a particular resource?
3. Consider enforcement point locations
NAC solutions typically provide considerable leeway as to where in the network access policies will be enforced. So, it’s up to the customer to determine the top protection priorities and locate enforcement points accordingly. An organization that seeks first to guard access to applications, for instance, may use a firewall as an enforcement point, noted Karthik Krishnan, manager of Juniper Networks’ access control products. But an organization more concerned with policing guest access may want to focus on areas such as conference rooms. In that case, a switch may be the preferred enforcement point, Krisnan said.

The 25 Most Common Mistakes in Email Security

25 tips to bring newbie Internet users up to speed so they stop comprimising your network security.
I still remember receiving my first phishing email in my AOL account. I had won the AOL lottery! As good as it sounded, I was skeptical at best. So without much thought, I opened the email and clicked on the link inside to check if I truly was a millionaire after all. Almost instantly, my computer crashed, and with each subsequent restart would crash again.
Countless computer crashes and thousands of spam emails later, I had learned the lesson that just opening spam email can bring harm to my computer. Unfortunately there are a whole host of traps and errors that catch new email users just because "they didn't know any better".
In this article we focus on 25 of the most common and easy to fix mistakes that people make when it comes to email security. We've designed this article with the new internet user in mind, so if you're an email expert, you may want to pass this along to your novice friends.
HERE I AM GOING TO EXPLAIN SOME POINT WHERE COMMON USER IS USEDT TO TRAPPED BY HACKERS/PHISHERS------
  1. Properly managing your email accounts
  2. Emailing the right people
  3. Making backups and keeping records
  4. Avoiding fraudulent email
  5. Avoiding malware
  6. Keeping hackers at bay
Properly managing your email accounts

1. Using just one email account.

Individuals new to email often think about their email account like they do their home address, you only have one home address, so you should only have one email. Instead, you should think about your email address like you do your keys; while it may be OK to use the same key for your front and your back door, having a single key open everything is both impractical and unsafe.

A good rule of thumb for the average email user is to keep a minimum of three email accounts. Your work account should be used exclusively for work-related conversations. Your second email account should be used for personal conversations and contacts, and your third email account should be used as a general catch-all for all hazardous behavior. That means that you should always sign up for newsletters and contests only through your third email account. Similarly, if you have to post your email account online, such as for your personal blog, you should only use your third email account (and post a web friendly form of it at that).

While your first and second email accounts can be paid or freebie, your third 'catch-all' account should always be a freebie account such as those offered by Gmail or Yahoo!. You should plan on having to dump and change out this account every six months, as the catch-all account will eventually become spammed when a newsletter manager decides to sell your name or a spammer steals your email address off a Web site.

2. Holding onto spammed-out accounts too long.

It is simply a fact of life that email accounts will accumulate spam over time. This is especially true of the account you use to sign up for newsletters and that you post online (which as stated above should not be your main email account). When this happens, it is best to simply dump the email account and start afresh. Unfortunately, however, many new email users get very attached to their email accounts and instead just wade through dozens of pieces of spam every day. To avoid the problem, prepare yourself mentally ahead of time for the idea that you will have to dump your 'catch all' account every six months.

3. Not closing the browser after logging out.

When you are checking your email at a library or cybercafé you not only need to log out of your email when you are done, but you also need to make sure to close the browser window completely. Some email services display your username (but not your password) even after you have logged out. While the service does this for your convenience, it compromises your email security.

4. Forgetting to delete browser cache, history and passwords.

After using a public terminal, it is important that you remember to delete the browser cache, history, and passwords. Most browsers automatically keep track of all the web pages that you have visited, and some keep track of any passwords and personal information that you enter in order to help you fill out similar forms in the future.

If this information falls into the wrong hands, it can lead to identity theft and stolen bank and email information. Because the stakes are so high, it is important that new internet users be aware of how to clear a public computers browser cache so that they can delete private information before lurking hackers can get a hold of it.

For those of you using Mozilla's Firefox, simply press Ctrl+Shift+Del. Opera users need go to Tools>>Delete Private Data. And users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer need to go to Tools>>Internet Options then click the 'Clear History', 'Delete Cookies', and 'Delete Files' buttons.



5. Using unsecure email accounts to send and receive sensitive corporate information.

Large corporations invest huge amounts of money to ensure that their computer networks and email remain secure. Despite their efforts, careless employees using personal email accounts to conduct company business and pass along sensitive data can undermine the security measures in place. So make sure that you don't risk your company's security, and your job, by transmitting sensitive company data via your own personal computer or email address.

6. Forgetting the telephone option

One of the most important lessons about email security is that no matter how many steps you take to secure your email, it will never be foolproof. This is never truer than when using a public computer. So unless you need a written record of something or are communicating across the globe, consider whether a simple phone call rather than an email is a better option. While a phone conversation may require a few extra minutes, when compared with accessing email through a public computer, a phone call is a far more secure option and it does not leave a paper trail.

Emailing the right people

7. Not using the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) option.

When you put a person's email addresses in the BCC: rather than the CC: window, none of the recipients can see the addresses of the other email recipients.

New email users often rely too much on the TO: because it is the default way of sending emails. That is fine as long as you are writing to just one person or a few family members. But if you are sending mail out to a diverse group of people, confusing BCC: and CC: raises some serious privacy and security concerns. It takes just one spammer to get a hold of the email and immediately everyone on your email list gets spammed.

Even if the honesty of the group isn't in question, many email programs are setup to automatically add to the address books any incoming email addresses. That means that some people in the group will inadvertently have added the entire list to their address book, and as a result, if one of their computers is infected with "Zombie" malware and silently sends out spam emails, you will have just caused the entire list to get spammed.

8. Being trigger happy with the "Reply All" button.

Sometimes the mistake isn't in deciding between CC: and BCC: but between hitting Reply All instead of Reply. When you hit Reply All, your email message is sent to everyone included on the original email, and if you didn't intend to include them, the information can be disastrous from both a security and personal humiliation perspective:

Example 1: "A very successful salesman at our networking company had a large email address book filled with his best customers, including some very important and conservative government contacts. With a single click, he accidentally sent a file chock-full of his favorite pornographic cartoons and jokes to everyone on his special customer list. His subject line: 'Special deals for my best customers!' Needless to say, he's cutting deals for another company these days."

Example 2: "A woman was in torment over a busted romance. She wrote a lengthy, detailed message to a girlfriend, adding that her ex-boyfriend preferred men to women. But instead of hitting Reply to a previous message from her girlfriend, she hit Reply All. Her secret was sent to dozens of people she didn't even know (including me), plus the aforementioned ex and his new boyfriend. As if that weren't bad enough, she did this two more times in quick succession!

9. Spamming as a result of forwarding email.

Forwarding emails can be a great way to quickly bring someone up to speed on a subject without having to write up a summary email, but if you aren't careful, forwarding emails can create a significant security threat for yourself and the earlier recipients of the email. As an email is forwarded, the recipients of the mail (until that point in time) are automatically listed in the body of the email. As the chain keeps moving forward, more and more recipient ids are placed on the list.

Unfortunately, if a spammer or someone just looking to make a quick buck gets a hold of the email, they can then sell the entire list of email ids and then everyone will start to get spammed. It only takes a few seconds to delete all the previous recipient ids before forwarding a piece of mail, and it can avoid the terrible situation of you being the cause of all your friends or coworkers getting spammed.

Making backups and keeping records

10. Failing to back up emails.

Emails are not just for idle chatting, but can also be used to make legally binding contracts, major financial decisions, and conduct professional meetings. Just as you would keep a hard copy of other important business and personal documents, it is important that you regularly back up your email to preserve a record if your email client crashes and loses data (It happened to Gmail as recently as December 2006).

Thankfully, most email providers make it rather simple to back up your email by allowing you to export emails to a particular folder and then just creating a copy of the folder and storing it onto a writeable CD, DVD, removable disk, or any other type of media. If that simple exporting process sounds too complicated, you can just buy automated backup software that will take care of the whole thing for you. Whether you purchase the software or decide to back up manually, it is important that you make and follow a regular backup schedule, as this is the sort of thing that new email users tend to just put off. The frequency of backups necessary for you will of course depend on your email usage, but under no circumstances should it be done less frequently than every 3 months.

11. Mobile access: Presuming a backup exists.

Mobile email access, such as through BlackBerry, has revolutionized the way we think about email; no longer is it tied to a PC, but rather it can be checked on-the-go anywhere. Most new BlackBerry users simply assume that a copy of the emails they check and delete off the BlackBerry will still be available on their home or office computer.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that some email servers and client software download emails to the Blackberry device and then delete them from the server. Thus, for some mobile email access devices, if you delete it from the device, you have deleted it from your Inbox.

Just be aware of the default settings of your email client and make sure that if you want a copy of the email retained, you have adjusted the email client's settings to make it happen. And preferably make sure of this before you decide to delete that important email.

12. Thinking that an erased email is gone forever.

We've all sent an embarrassing or unfortunate email and sighed relief when it was finally deleted, thinking the whole episode was behind us. Think again. Just because you delete an email message from your inbox and the sender deletes it from their 'Sent' inbox, does not mean that the email is lost forever. In fact, messages that are deleted often still exist in backup folders on remote servers for years, and can be retrieved by skilled professionals.

So start to think of what you write in an email as a permanent document. Be careful about what you put into writing, because it can come back to haunt you many years after you assumed it was gone forever.

Avoiding fraudulent email

13. Believing you won the lottery … and other scam titles.

Spammers use a wide variety of clever titles to get you to open emails which they fill with all sorts of bad things. New email users often make the mistake of opening these emails. So in an effort to bring you up to speed, let me tell you quickly:

* You have not won the Irish Lotto, the Yahoo Lottery, or any other big cash prize.
* There is no actual Nigerian King or Prince trying to send you $10 million.
* Your Bank Account Details do not need to be reconfirmed immediately.
* You do not have an unclaimed inheritance.
* You never actually sent that "Returned Mail".
* The News Headline email is not just someone informing you about the daily news.
* You have not won an iPod Nano.

14. Not recognizing phishing attacks in email content.

While never opening a phishing email is the best way to secure your computer, even the most experienced email user will occasionally accidentally open up a phishing email. At this point, the key to limiting your damage is recognizing the phishing email for what it is.

Phishing is a type of online fraud wherein the sender of the email tries to trick you into giving out personal passwords or banking information. The sender will typically steal the logo from a well-known bank or PayPal and try to format the email to look like it comes from the bank. Usually the phishing email asks for you to click on a link in order to confirm your banking information or password, but it may just ask you to reply to the email with your personal information.

Whatever form the phishing attempt takes, the goal is to fool you into entering your information into something which appears to be safe and secure, but in fact is just a dummy site set up by the scammer. If you provide the phisher with personal information, he will use that information to try to steal your identity and your money.

Signs of phishing include:

* A logo that looks distorted or stretched.
* Email that refers to you as "Dear Customer" or "Dear User" rather than including your actual name.
* Email that warns you that an account of yours will be shut down unless you reconfirm your billing information immediately.
* An email threatening legal action.
* Email which comes from an account similar, but different from, the one the company usually uses.
* An email that claims 'Security Compromises' or 'Security Threats' and requires immediate action.

If you suspect that an email is a phishing attempt, the best defense is to never open the email in the first place. But assuming you have already opened it, do not reply or click on the link in the email. If you want to verify the message, manually type in the URL of the company into your browser instead of clicking on the embedded link.

15. Sending personal and financial information via email.

Banks and online stores provide, almost without exception, a secured section on their website where you can input your personal and financial information. They do this precisely because email, no matter how well protected, is more easily hacked than well secured sites. Consequently, you should avoid writing to your bank via email and consider any online store that requests that you send them private information via email suspect.

This same rule of avoiding placing financial information in emails to online businesses also holds true for personal emails. If, for example, you need to give your credit card information to your college student child, it is far more secure to do so over the phone than via email.

16. Unsubscribing to newsletters you never subscribed to.

A common technique used by spammers is to send out thousands of fake newsletters from organizations with an "unsubscribe" link on the bottom of the newsletter. Email users who then enter their email into the supposed "unsubscribe" list are then sent loads of spam. So if you don't specifically remember subscribing to the newsletter, you are better off just blacklisting the email address, rather than following the link and possibly picking up a Trojan horse or unknowingly signing yourself up for yet more spam.

Avoiding malware

17. Trusting your friends email.

Most new internet users are very careful when it comes to emails from senders they don't recognize. But when a friend sends an email, all caution goes out the window as they just assume it is safe because they know that the sender wouldn't intend to hurt them. The truth is, an email from a friend's ID is just as likely to contain a virus or malware as a stranger's. The reason is that most malware is circulated by people who have no idea they are sending it, because hackers are using their computer as a zombie.

It is important to maintain and keep updated email scanning and Anti-virus software, and to use it to scan ALL incoming emails.

18. Deleting spam instead of blacklisting it.

An email blacklist is a user created list of email accounts that are labeled as spammers. When you 'blacklist' an email sender, you tell your email client to stop trusting emails from this particular sender and to start assuming that they are spam.

Unfortunately, new internet users are often timid to use the blacklist feature on their email client, and instead just delete spam emails. While not every piece of spam is from repeat senders, a surprising amount of it is. So by training yourself to hit the blacklist button instead of the delete button when confronted with spam, you can, in the course of a few months, drastically limit the amount of spam that reaches your Inbox.

19. Disabling the email spam filter.

New email users typically do not start out with a lot of spam in their email account and thus do not value the help that an email spam filter can provide at the beginning of their email usage. Because no spam filter is perfect, initially the hassle of having to look through one's spam box looking for wrongly blocked emails leads many new email users to instead just disable their email spam filter altogether.

However, as an email account gets older it tends to pick up more spam, and without the spam filter an email account can quickly become unwieldy. So instead of disabling their filter early on, new internet users should take the time to whitelist emails from friends that get caught up in the spam filter. Then, when the levels of spam start to pick up, the email account will remain useful and fewer and fewer friends will get caught up in the filter.
20. Failing to scan all email attachments.

Nine out of every ten viruses that infect a computer reach it through an email attachment. Yet despite this ratio, many people still do not scan all incoming email attachments. Maybe it is our experience with snail mail, but often when we see an email with an attachment from someone we know, we just assume that the mail and its attachment are safe. Of course that assumption is wrong, as most email viruses are sent by 'Zombies' which have infected a computer and caused it to send out viruses without the owner even knowing.

What makes this oversight even more scandalous is the fact that a number of free email clients provide an email attachment scanner built-in. For example, if you use Gmail or Yahoo! for your email, every email and attachment you send or receive is automatically scanned. So if you do not want to invest in a third-party scanner and your email provider does not provide attachment scanning built-in, you should access your attachments through an email provider that offers free virus scanning by first forwarding your attachments to that account before opening them.

Keeping hackers at bay

21. Sharing your account information with others.

We've all done it – we need an urgent mail checked, and we call up our spouse or friend and request them to check our email on our behalf. Of course, we trust these people, but once the password is known to anybody other than you, your account is no longer as secure as it was.

The real problem is that your friend might not use the same security measures that you do. Your friend might be accessing his email through an unsecured wireless account, he may not keep his anti-virus software up to date, or he might be infected with a keylogger virus that automatically steals your password once he enters it. So ensure that you are the only person that knows your personal access information, and if you write it down, make sure to do so in a way that outsiders won't be able to understand easily what they are looking at if they happen to find your records.

22. Using simple and easy-to-guess passwords.

Hackers use computer programs that scroll through common names to compile possible user names, and then send spam emails to those usernames. When you open that spam email, a little hidden piece of code in the email sends a message back to the hacker letting him know that the account is valid, at which point they turn to the task of trying to guess your password.

Hackers often create programs which cycle through common English words and number combinations in order to try to guess a password. As a consequence, passwords that consist of a single word, a name, or a date are frequently "guessed" by hackers. So when creating a password use uncommon number and letter combinations which do not form a word found in a dictionary. A strong password should have a minimum of eight characters, be as meaningless as possible, as well as use both upper and lowercase letters. Creating a tough password means that the hacker's computer program will have to scroll through tens of thousands of options before guessing your password, and in that time most hackers simply give up.

23. Failing to encrypt your important emails.

No matter how many steps you take to minimize the chance that your email is being monitored by hackers, you should always assume that someone else is watching whatever comes in and out of your computer. Given this assumption, it is important to encrypt your emails to make sure that if someone is monitoring your account, at least they can't understand what you're saying.

While there are some top-of-the-line email encryption services for those with a big budget, if you are new to email and just want a simple and cheap but effective solution, you can follow these step-by-step 20 minute instructions to install PGP, the most common email encryption standard. Encrypting all your email may be unrealistic, but some mail is too sensitive to send in the clear, and for those emails, PGP is an important email security step.
24. Not encrypting your wireless connection.

While encrypting your important emails makes it hard for hackers who have access to your email to understand what they say, it is even better to keep hackers from getting access to your emails in the first place.
One of the most vulnerable points in an emails trip from you to the email recipient is the point between your laptop and the wireless router that you use to connect to the internet. Consequently, it is important that you encrypt your wifi network with the WPA2 encryption standard. The upgrade process is relatively simple and straightforward, even for the newest internet user, and the fifteen minutes it takes are well worth the step up in email security.


25. Failing to use digital signatures.

The law now recognizes email as an important form of communication for major undertakings such as signing a contract or entering into a financial agreement. While the ability to enter into these contracts online has made all of our lives easier, it has also created the added concern of someone forging your emails and entering into agreements on your behalf without your consent.

One way to combat email forgery is to use a digital signature whenever you sign an important email. A digital signature will help prove who and from what computer an email comes from, and that the email has not been altered in transit. By establishing the habit of using an email signature whenever you sign important emails, you will not only make it harder for the other party to those agreements to try to modify the email when they want to get out of it, but it will also give you extra credibility when someone tries to claim that you have agreed to a contract via email that you never did.

What is spyware?

What is spyware?

Spyware is a general term used for software that traces user activity on the PC and collects personal info or confidential data without user consent. Spyware can register the websites you visit, the time of visits, all clicks on the keyboard (this is how credit card numbers and pin-codes are often stolen) or monitor and register secretly for software that is in turn installed on a PC.

The most dangerous spyware one which self replicates via e-mail, and installs itself without your consent using software bugs. Software intercepting e-mails and instant messages can collect and transmit confidential information to Internet, and are also dangerous and valid security concerns. Some software may also change parameters of installed security software without your consent. All this makes your computer vulnerable to spyware attacks. Depending on the type of spyware, some programs may warn the developer about users running applications on their PCs, while others are able to make holes for intrusion into the system, or set the modem to make calls, which the PC owner will eventually be billed for. Recently, some shareware programs have been referred to as spyware, such programs extract files from your computer without your consent. One of the most dangerous features of spyware is the ability to transmit collected information to the developer’s PC.

Spyware can enter your PC in a number of different ways. The most common is via e-mail or a Web browser. Also such software may be integrated into “useful” software and downloaded at the moment of “useful” program start-up. Generally such programs are integrated into popular free software, which are downloaded from the Internet, or distributed on CDs attached to magazines.
Why spyware is dangerous?

Spyware doesn’t have much influence on the way your PC runs. Usually, it doesn’t contain viruses, however it can consume a huge amount of system resources. Spyware brings lots of damage in the sense of data confidentiality. Spyware programs register every user step, both inside the system and in the Internet. All information is delivered to the malefactor who collects data in his, not your, interest!

How do I protect my PC from spyware?

Most spyware programs are integrated into freeware that you have to install on your computer, but some are automatically downloaded when you enter a Web site. If a message pops-up on your screen proposing you install a program providing access to Web site content, don't hurry to press “OK” without checking the software. If there is no need to install some special software to view the Web site, it’s better to refuse downloading extra software.

On some Web sites you can find lists of programs containing harmful spy modules. Looking through these lists can help you learn if such programs have been installed on your computer. Sometimes PC system behavior such as slow typing, periodical alarms of installed firewalls, registration queries to unknown Web sites, system and network efficiency reduction and suspicious file discovery may indicate that spyware is inside. The best way to protect your computer from spyware is to install specialized anti-spy software.

How do I protect my PC from spyware?

A firewall is considered to be the most popular tool to protect a computer from spyware. Firewalls are integrated into operating systems (OS) and permanently examine incoming and outgoing addresses to computer network ports. They analyze data packages coming to Internet ports and mail ports according to the type of request and the addressee. Most firewalls allow or deny some types of addresses, but this is a weak point because spyware may be integrated inside many packages or disguised as a Web browser. This type of spyware cannot be detected by a firewall, and gets inside the PC to start its malicious activity. Also, firewalls are usually resource-consuming, so the price for relative security is your PC running much slower.

The problem of firewall relative protection is successfully solved by proactive security systems. Such systems analyze all application activity on the PC for its potential maliciousness, according to predefined rules of malicious or non-dangerous behavior. In case of a real threat, proactive systems block dangerous programs before any damage to the OS is done.

An anti-spyware solutions called Safe’n’Sec+Anti-Spyware, is a special solution consisting of Safe’n’Sec behavior analyzer -- which blocks previously unknown spyware (new modifications) -- and the Anti-Spyware module, which detects already known spyware with the help of extended anti-spyware signature databases. This Anti-Spyware module has the option to delete malware from the user's PC. The solution is absolutely compatible with any traditional security software installed on your computer. Anti-Spyware solutions efficiently protect your confidential data from unauthorized access, whether you work in the system or just browse the Internet.

World of Warcraft Attacked by Phishers

World of Warcraft players desperate for a new mount to traverse the online role-playing game's fantasy world are getting a reality check from hackers who have devised a clever pop-up phishing scam to spread malware.

Security technicians at F-Secure Security Lab on Tuesday posted a blog entry Tuesday detailing the latest scam making its way through the world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

With more than 11.5 million monthly subscribers, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft is not only the most successful MMORPG in history, but also a very popular environment for hackers, phishers and assorted click-fraud scam artists.

This latest hoax preys on players' desire to add mounts for their online avatars to ride. After clicking on a link to get a new trial mount, players are redirected to a malicious phishing Web site that mimics an official WoW page.

Those players who are still hard up for a mount are then prompted to enter their WoW log-in details.

"Apart from losing all the gold and items saved, a compromised account could also be used to send out the malicious messages to other victims, adding insult to injury," the researchers warned in their blog post. "An interesting detail about this particular site is that a reverse-IP check on its IP address turned up over a dozen other WoW phishing sites."

F-Secure officials remind players that phishing sites like the one identified today are blocked by the security firm's browser protection software.

World of Warcraft holds an estimated 62 percent of the MMORPG market. The third expansion set, Cataclysm, was announced at the BlizzCon conference earlier this year.

Security Report: Firefox Most Vulnerable

Application security vendor Cenzic today released its security trends report for the first half of 2009 application. In it, Cenzic claims that the Mozilla's Firefox browser led the field of Web browsers in terms of total vulnerabilities.

According to Cenzic, Firefox accounted for 44 percent of all browser vulnerabilities reported in the first half of 2009. In contrast, Apple's Safari had 35 percent of all reported browser vulnerability, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was third at 15 percent and Opera had just six percent share.
The 2009 figures stand in contrast to Cenzic's Q3/Q4 2008 report, where IE accounted for 43 percent of all reported Web browser vulnerabilities and Firefox followed closely at 39 percent.
As to why Firefox's numbers were so high, Cenzic has a few ideas.

"It's a combination of different things," Lars Ewe, CTO of Cenzic, told InternetNews.com. "They've gotten more traction as a browser, which is good for them and the more you get used the more exposure you have. As well a fair amount of the vulnerabilities have come by way of plug-ins."
One key area that Ewe said was responsible for a number of reported Firefox vulnerabilities is with how the browser handles plug-ins.

"The plug-in architecture that they have is a selling fact for the browser and one of the reasons why I love using it," Ewe said. "They can't control security aspects of all the plug-ins and the vulnerabilities are a side effect of that."

Mozilla has made numerous efforts this year to bolster its plug-in security. Recently they launched a plug-in checker service to ensure that users are running up-to-date versions. The Firefox 3.0.9 update, which came out in April, specifically addressed several key plug-in vulnerabilities.

Though Firefox had the highest number of vulnerabilities, that doesn't necessarily mean that Firefox users were more vulnerable.

Ewe said that Cenzic looked at all reported vulnerabilities. There is no specific differentiation for zero day bugs in the browser vulnerability count either. All that raises the question of how Cenzic actually came up with their vulnerability counts in the first place.

"The process that we follow is looking at a number of different vulnerability databases and sources that we have and trying to come up with a fair percentage based on the deviations we see between the databases," Ewe said. "You could make the argument, that's its 40 percent or 42 percent and there might be some variation on how you analyze it, but certainly it's not off by 20 percent."

While the Cenzic report shows Firefox at the top of the browser vulnerability pile, Ewe was quick to note that Cenzic uses Mozilla technology within its own solutions.

"Full disclosure here, Mozilla plays an important role in Cenzic's solution," Ewe said. "We are actually sitting on top of Mozilla as our agent of preference for scanning sites."

Cenzic develops an application scanning solution that uses the underlying Mozilla browser technology to test out security on Web site insides of a real browser context.

"We have a technology that we refer to as stateful assessment technology," Ewe said. "The idea behind it is to have as faithful an interaction with a Web site as possible and to determine vulnerabilities not on simple signatures but on behavioral basis of the application."

Ewe explained that when you do a cross-site scripting attack with a signature-based approach you'd just look for a server response that would indicate that the script tag has been injected. He added that the problem with that approach is that it's not faithful and the security researcher doesn't know if there is any additional logic on the client side that takes care of the script tag.

"If you want to be really faithful in the process you need to have full rendering capabilities and have all the JavaScript event handling," Ewe said. "So we leverage the entire Firefox architecture in order for us to actually have as faithful an interaction with a server as possible and maintain the client state. That results in low false-positives."

Sensible Password Policy: Longer is Better

The SANS Institute recommends passwords should be at least 15 characters long, which effectively means that these password can't be carried around in end users' heads. Let's take a look at how secure a password this long would be.

If we take a scenario in which user passwords are made up of upper and lower case letters and numbers, each password character can be one of 62 possible characters. A fifteen character password thus has 62^15, or more than 750 million, million, million, million possibilities. That's a lot. If you got a pool of a million computers working on the problem, it would take about 2 million million years to check them all.

A healthy dose of realism is clearly in order. "A lot of guidance about password length and complexity is just a sticking plaster over an underlying problem with passwords," says Dr Ant Allan, a research vice president at Gartner. "It's important to remember that if you increase length or complexity you are only defending against some kinds of attacks anyway," he says. "If the end user's machine is infected with spyware then the password will still be discovered, regardless. And a long password does nothing to prevent a hacker getting a password using social engineering. These types of policies are beloved of auditors, trotting out established ideas."

Fifteen is an arbitrary figure for password length, so what would happen if shorter ones were used? They would certainly be easier to remember, and since, as Dr Allan points out, security is only as good as the weakest point, the reduction in security would not be as great as it might at first appear. The passwords might be a little more easy to crack, but since a ten character password would still take a great deal of time to crack, it's still far more likely that any security breach would come from an internal attacker, a social engineer, or through a malware attack than a successful brute-force attack.

Over time computers get more powerful, and the time needed to crack passwords of a given length goes down. Increasing password length by a single character is surprisingly effective at counteracting several years' of advances in technology: if the extra character is drawn from a pool of a hundred possibilities, then essentially adding a random character makes the password 100 times harder to crack.
Password Change Intervals

Password change intervals are usually also specified in corporate password policies, and the SANS Institute recommends that end user passwords are changed every four months. The rationale behind this is not clear: with this policy in force a hacker would still have an average of two months to exploit any password he acquired – more than enough time to do some harm.

Given that users forget passwords more often when they are changed regularly, and that there is a usually a significant cost involved in providing a help desk to reset large numbers of user passwords, you could argue that changing passwords is a fairly pointless but rather expensive exercise. "There has certainly been an argument around for a few years now that changing passwords is more trouble than it is worth", says Dr Allan. "People argue that it prevents employees who leave an organization from exploiting their passwords after they have left, but this is just a cover for poor administration."

One possible solution to the problem of using passwords which are difficult to remember is to use a password manager. These applications encrypt and store passwords securely for end users so they don't need to be written down, and ensure they can only be accessed by the user after entering a password. The virtue of these systems is that users are only expected to remember a single password instead of numerous different ones. In the final piece in this series we'll be taking a closer look at this type of application.

14 More Open Source Tools to Protect Your Identity

AS IN PREVIOUS POST I DID EXPLAIN 14 OPEN TOOL FOR SECURE YOUR DATA,IN THIS POST I ADD SOME MORE TOOL AND EXPLAIN TO--SO READ AND APLY THEN GIVE COMENT...AS ADVICE....YOUR ADVICE WILL PROVIDE ME A WAY AND ENERGY TO COLLECT MORE INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR NEED
To help you keep from making the same sort of mistake I did, we've compiled a list of 14 more open source apps that can help protect your identity. Some of these fit into traditional security categories, like anti-spam, anti-virus, and firewalls. Others, like browsers, e-mail, and PDF tools, we've included in this list because they include encryption or other security features that can help you protect yourself.
No one is likely to need all 14 of these apps, but the list should give you plenty of options for filling in any security gaps in your system.Open Source Anti-Spam=========

Open Source Compression

1. 7-zip

7-zip offers higher than normal compression ratios and supports multiple file formats. However, in order to take advantage of its strong AES-256 encryption capabilities, you'll need to create either 7z or zip files. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

2. PeaZip

One of the most flexible compression utilities available, PeaZip currently supports about 90 different archive file formats. It also supports multiple encryption standards and even offers a two-factor authentication option for maximum security. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

3. KGB Archiver

One big benefit of using this compression utility is that it encrypts files with AES-256 encryption automatically. It also supports multiple file formats and nine different languages (but not Russian, which seems odd for an app named after the KGB). Operating System: Windows.

Open Source Data Destruction

4. Darik's Boot And Nuke

Also known as "DBAN," Darik's Boot and Nuke allows you to create a boot disk (CD, DVD, thumb drive, or even an old floppy) which will completely erase all the drives it can detect on your system. It's a great tool if you're getting rid of an old computer, but not as helpful if you're just deleting a few files. Operating System: OS Independent.

5. Eraser

If you need to erase only a few files—perhaps your financial or tax records, work files, or as the website suggests, bad poetry—Eraser is the tool for you. It overwrites deleted data multiple times, making it nearly impossible to retrieve the "erased" files. Operating System: Windows.

6. BleachBit

Like Eraser, BleachBit can completely erase files, but it also includes a number of other features to help protect your privacy and speed up your system. For example, it can erase your cache, remove your browsing history and cookies, clean up junk left by more than 50 applications, and much more. Operating System: Windows, Linux.

Open Source Email

7. Thunderbird

This e-mail client from Mozilla (the makers of Firefox) includes built-in encryption capabilities, anti-spam, and phishing protection. It further protects you by blocking remote images in e-mail and alerting you when security updates become available. Operating System, Windows, Linux, OS X.

8. Zmail

Need to send a secret e-mail? Zmail lets you send e-mail messages anonymously if you know your SMTP server address. Operating System: OS Independent.

Open Source Encryption

9. AxCrypt

With more than 1.5 million registered users, AxCrypt has become one of the most popular open-source encryption applications. It integrates seamlessly with Windows—simply right-click a file to encrypt it. Operating System: Windows.

10. TrueCrypt

With more than 12 million downloads, TrueCrypt is also a very popular way to protect your files. While AxCrypt focuses on encrypting individual files, TrueCrypt makes it easy to encrypt a drive partition or an entire drive (including USB thumb drives). Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

11. Gnu Privacy Guard

Also known as "GPG," Gnu Privacy Guard lets you encrypt and digitally sign documents before transmitting them. This is a command line tool, but the Web site includes links to a number of graphical interfaces for the software. Operating System: Windows, Linux, Unix, OS X.

Open Source File Transfer

12. FileZilla

FileZilla supports regular FTP and the more secure FTPS and SFTP protocols. While the client version should work with any operating system, the server version only works with Windows machines. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

13. WinSCP

This Windows-only file transfer tool has won tons of awards and supports FTP, SFTP, and the older SCP file transfer protocols. Note that it's a client-only tool—i.e., you can use it to download files from other sites, but you can't use it to set up your own FTP server. Operating System: Windows.

Open Source File Sharing

14. Waste

While most file sharing networks are designed to help users circumvent copyright laws, Waste at least claims to be aimed at law-abiding citizens. With it, small groups (10-50 nodes) can chat and share data securely without opening their systems to unauthorized users. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

Open Source Firewalls

15. Firestarter

Unlike most of the open-source firewalls, Firestarter can protect a single PC as well as a network. Best of all, you can probably install it and be up and running in just a couple of minutes. Operating System: Linux.

16. IPCop

IPCop is a complete Linux distribution designed to be used as a standalone firewall and boasts a very user-friendly interface. To use it, you'll need an old PC to connect to your network. Operating System: Linux.

17. Vyatta

Vyatta sells open source networking hardware and software commerically atwww.vyatta.com, and they also maintain the free, community version. With the community version, you can turn a PC into a network appliance that offers routing, firewalling, VPN, intrusion prevention, and WAN load balancing services. Operating System: Linux.
32. SmoothWall E
Because it's designed to be used by people with no knowledge of Linux, SmoothWall Express is an excellent option if you aren't a technical whiz, but want to tackle setting up your own network. A supported commercial version is also available. Operating System: Linux.
33. LEA
The "Linux Embedded Appliance Framework" (aka LEAF) can be used as an Internet gateway, router, firewall, or wireless access point. This app requires a little more know-how than some of the other choices in the category, but is a good option. Operating System: Linux.

14:-Open Source Tools to Protect Your Identity

Usually these lists of open source software start with statistics or general observations on current trends in the open source community. This one starts with a personal story.
I used to use a thumb drive to backup my budget software, and I also kept a copy of our tax returns on the same drive. While the files were password protected, I didn't encrypt them because the drive never left the house, and we don't exactly live in a high crime area.
Then one day my friend was looking for a drive to carry some files to the school where he teaches. As you probably guessed, he grabbed the drive with our financial info on it. And as you probably also guessed, someone stole his computer and the thumb drive right out of his classroom. As a result, I've had the great joy of spending many, many hours changing our account numbers, checking our credit reports, and setting up fraud alerts.
To help you keep from making the same sort of mistake I did, we've compiled a list of 14 open source apps that can help protect your identity. Some of these fit into traditional security categories, like anti-spam, anti-virus, and firewalls. Others, like browsers, e-mail, and PDF tools, we've included in this list because they include encryption or other security features that can help you protect yourself.
No one is likely to need all 14 of these apps, but the list should give you plenty of options for filling in any security gaps in your system.Open Source Anti-Spam
1. SpamAssassin
The highly acclaimed "#1 open-source spam filter," SpamAssassin, uses a number of different features to identify spam, including header tests, body phrase tests, Bayesian filtering, blacklists and whitelists, and others. It can be used on its own, but it's also been incorporated into a number of other commercial and open-source applications. Operating System: OS Independent.
2. ASSP
Humbly claiming to be "the absolute best SPAM fighting weapon that the world has ever known," ASSP is short for "Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy" Server. While it takes a little work to get it up and running at first, it doesn't require a lot of maintenance, and the site wiki includes extensive help on configuring the app so that it works for you. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.
3. Spamato
Available as an Outlook add-on, as a Thunderbird extension, or as a stand-alone proxy, Spamato uses multiple filters to separate junk mail from the stuff you actually want to receive. Unlike some anti-spam tools, it also lets you see why a message gets classified as spam and adjust your settings as necessary. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.
Open Source Anti-Spyware
4. Nixory
Nixory will quickly scan your system and remove any malicious cookies from Firefox. Unlike some similar apps, you can use it alongside other anti-virus or anti-spyware applications without first disabling those systems. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.
Open Source Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware
5. ClamAV
One of the best-known open-source security projects, ClamAV provides e-mail virus and malware scanning for Unix-based systems. Its owners update its prodigious virus database several times each day to provide up-to-the minute protection from evolving threats. Operating System: Linux.
6. ClamWin
Based on the well-respected ClamAV engine, ClamWin integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Windows Explorer to scan files for viruses and other malware. You can set it up to automatically download the updated virus database, and you can schedule system scans. However, unlike many commercial products, it does not include a real-time scanner for files you receive by e-mail. You'll need to save files and right-click in order to scan them for viruses. Operating System: Windows.
7. ClamTK
As you might expect, this is another interface for ClamAV, this time for Linux only. Operating System: Linux.
8. Moon Secure
This app also uses the Clam AV engine (though developers claim to be working on one of their own), but offers a different interface and some different features. Operating System: Windows.
Open Source Backup
9. Amanda
Currently protecting more than 500,000 computers, Amanda is one of the most popular (if not the most popular) open-source backup and recovery program. Importantly, it encrypts backup data both in transit and at rest. Several commercial vendors (notably, Zmanda) use Amanda to offer cloud backup services for users who prefer to store archived data off-site. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.
10. Areca Backup
Designed to be both flexible and simple, Areca Backup makes it extremely easy to archive your files and work with those archived files (browse, merge, track versions, etc.). It also gives users the option to encrypt backup files with strong algorithms. Operating System: Windows, Linux.
11. Bacula
While it's primarily aimed at enterprises and users with large networks, Bacula can also be used to backup a small home network or a single system. It's an excellent program (one of the most popular open source enterprise apps), but you need to be pretty tech-savvy to use it. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.
Open Source Browser
12. Firefox
An independent study cited on the Firefox site claims that Internet Explorer users are vulnerable to threats 98 percent of the time while Firefox users are only vulnerable 2 percent of the time. In addition to being secure, Firefox is fast and highly customizable. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.
13. Tor Browser Bundle
If you're really paranoid about privacy or have other reasons for wanting to browse the Internet anonymously, the Tor Bundle will install with your existing browser for ultimate protection. When its running, no one can tell what sites you are visiting, sites can't figure out your physical location, and you should be able to access sites that are blocked by governments or Web filtering software. You can also install it on a thumb drive for mobility. Operating System: Windows.
14. TorK
For Linux users, this Tor front-end lets you anonymously browse the Internet, send instant messages and e-mail, and more. Operating System: Linux.

How to Be Safer on Twitter

“Twitter is insecure. Twitter is the root of all evil.”

Right. Much has indeed been written about Twitter’s security – or lack thereof– in just the past couple of months. In taking in what others have to say, though, I can’t help but think it’s being unfairly attacked.

Let’s take a fair and objective view of some of the issues, and see what, if anything, a user can do to reduce her risk.

Twitter, the wildly popular micro-blogging web site, has roared onto the scene in an amazingly short time, even by Internet standards. Twitter users can post short (140-character) messages known as “tweets” to all their followers. Pretty much anyone can follow anyone else’s tweets on Twitter, although there are some minimal privacy settings and such for those who want to limit the scope of where their tweets go and who can see them.

It’s through this simple matrix of followers and writers that communities of like-minded people have joined one another in reading and posting their tweets.

But several articles and blog entries have been published declaring Twitter to be insecure. A common theme among the naysayers has been Twitter’s use of TinyURL, a site/service that encodes long URLs—we’ve all seen them—to be just a few characters long. No doubt this is used so that people can post tweets with URLs and still fit within the 140-character tweet limit.

The problem with TinyURL and similar encoding mechanisms is that the end user really doesn’t know what’s in the original URL itself. Thus, a tweet could be pointing the reader to a hostile site containing maliciously formed data that could quite conceivably attack the reader’s browser.

All of this is true, of course, but so what? The truth is that any URL we click on or enter into our browsers manually can take us to sites that contain malicious data. Granted, some sites are going to seem more trustworthy than others: a respected news outlet is likely to be more trustworthy than (say) www.click-here-to-infect-your-computer.com—which, by the way, I think is not a registered domain.

Even still, I again ask the question: so what? There is an inherent risk in pointing your browser to any web site. We’ve discussed here numerous ways of shoring up your browser so that you’re less likely to have your system compromised, even if you visit a site containing malicious data. All of these things are entirely relevant in the context of Twitter, of course.

Another common complaint is that there’s no verification of a Twitter user’s identity, so someone could trivially pose as (say) a celebrity and the public would be none the wiser. This too is quite true, but it’s nothing new with Twitter.

Anyone still remember the old “kremvax” April Fools’ joke from 1984? Spoofing an identity was as true then as it is now. In the absence of a trustworthy cryptographic signature, digital identity must not be trusted.

Now, to be fair, there have been a few published coding vulnerabilities on Twitter, including some cross-site scripting problems, “clickjacking” problems, etc. But from what I can tell as an outsider (and a Twitter user), the folks at Twitter have fixed these problems on the server as they’ve been reported. I don’t have data on how rapidly they’ve been fixed, but they do appear to be addressing them.

All of these security and privacy concerns are valid, but they’re by no means new or unique to Twitter. No, it seems to me that Twitter is being unfairly attacked for whatever reasons. I’ve heard many folks complain about Twitter’s 140-character tweet limit, saying that nothing of value can be communicated in such a small message, therefore Twitter must be without merit.

I won’t get into a debate of whether one can say something valuable on 140 characters or not, but suffice to say that I’ve seen many 140-character tweets that were of value to me. But let’s get past that and consider some positive recommendations on how to safely use twitter, assuming that you also want to hear what some of your colleagues want to say in 140 characters.

  1. • Don’t click on encoded URLs if you at all doubt them. If they point to something you feel you do want to read, direct message or email the tweet’s author and ask for the full citation, and then decide whether it deserves your trust.
  2. • Harden your browser anyway, just like I’ve suggested here many times.
  3. • Follow people who post things you’re genuinely interested in. Follow people you trust. Verify their Twitter identities via a trustworthy channel like, for instance, an encrypted or cryptographically signed email.
  4. • Avoid twits. There is a lot of noise on twitter. Life is too short for that blather. Shut it off.
  5. • If you’re concerned about the privacy of what you post, set your own account to “protect my posts,” which restricts your tweets to only your followers. Approve (or disapprove) your followers. Block followers you don’t know or otherwise don’t want reading your tweets.
  6. • Avoid posting URLs, or post really short URLs so that your tweets don’t automatically invoke TinyURL. If you want to point to a URL, tell your followers to direct message you to request the full URL.

These, of course, are just some basic precautions you could take if you wanted to use Twitter in a reasonably safe way. Above all, though, treat it for what it is—a means of posting short bursts of information to people. If you want your own tweets to be valuable to others, be concise. Very concise

How to Keep Cloud Computing Secure

How to Keep Cloud Computing Secure

Working off an external network in the cloud brings the benefits of offsite storage backup, but also comes with some dangers: Viruses, spam, malware and identity theft are among the threats you may face.

Along with the dangers of sharing your data externally with outside parties comes some security benefits as well, according to Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Apps. Although companies now allow cloud vendors access to their data, "just sharing a document and not an entire infrastructure is a tremendous benefit," he says.

"You don't have to figure out multiple security zones, only one front-facing connection," adds Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, a company that provides data management and data-transfer backup for software-as-a-service and Web companies.

Here we provide some tips from experts on how to keep your cloud computing setup secure.

Watch what you open

Cloud provider Salesforce warns on its trust site not to open suspect e-mails. This may seem like common sense, but many people don't follow this advice. Watch suspicious links as well.

Ask your provider about incident response, Balding advises. The provider should be able to help in the event of an intrusion attempt, he says. You should also ask if the company will take an image of the machine or whether you must do this yourself.

When you open files, make sure your network access is encrypted, suggests Craig Balding, a technical security lead at a Fortune 500 firm and author of a blog on cloud computing security. Balding notes that Amazon doesn't encrypt data for its Web Services business. On its trust site, Salesforce.com recommends two-factor authentication techniques such as RSA tokens or Smart Cards.

Protect your cloud API keys

You want to make sure your cloud API keys are secure, Balding warns. "If someone gets hold of your access key, they've got everything," he says. "Require the provider to give you keys for different sets of data and risk classification," Balding suggests.

He also advises putting your production data in one account and your development data in another account. This will lessen the risks of someone breaking into your less secure development machine, he says.

Pay as you go

To avoid competitors running up the bill, pay for cloud services as needed, Balding advises. "It's good to have a threshold if usage goes way up, he says.

Replicate data

Google's Feigenbaum stresses the importance of data replication across multiple data centers. In the event of a disaster in the Northeast, for instance, data could still be accessed from other regions. "If something bad would happen to the Northeast such as a snowstorm, and cut off power, your data would be served from another data center, and no one would really know," Feigenbaum says.

Reduce endpoint reliability

"The concept of the cloud is to store minimal data on your endpoint devices," Feigenbaum says. "Endpoint devices are hard to secure -- you're taking security out of the experts' hands and putting it into the users' hands." The FBI reports that 1 out of every 10 laptops is stolen in its first 12 months since purchase. And though USB keys are convenient, they're easily lost.

"Don't overlook client-side security," advises Joe Krause, director of product management for information security consulting firm Trustwave.

Ensure proper compliance and certifications in data transactions

OpSource's Ryan advises that transactions involving credit cards should be PCI compliant. "If our system is not PCI compliant, the system breaks and you don't have a secure transaction of Web data," Ryan explains.

Ryan says in corporate environments, enterprises should follow SaaS 70, a safety protocol. Meanwhile, health care companies need to heed HIPAA regulations as medical data travels in the cloud.

Understand vulnerability management

Trustwave's Krause says providers need to be able to manage the vulnerability of a single piece of data to affect a large number of clients. "A single vulnerability has the potential to expose the critical assets of a large number of their clients," Krause says. "Cloud computing providers have to be able to show that they're aware of the vulnerabilities of the cloud and that they're not waiting for someone else to show them there's a vulnerability," he explains.

Keep a forensics and Web log

Providers need to know where their customers' data is at all times, Krause says. "There's got to be a way to follow the audit trial, where the data was at any point in time," he says. A forensics and Web log accomplishes this, he says. "Enable logging so you get visibility on how people are using your services you put in the cloud," Balding suggests. "You might detect some attacks that way. If you don't turn on the logging, you're not seeing any of the bad stuff or hacker potential," Balding says.

Also check with IT to see if other divisions of the company have already signed up for the cloud service, because if they have, a security breach can occur. Balding says to confer with the finance department to see if anyone else in the company has spent money on that service. It's a company hazard if the same information is in the cloud twice