THWART HACKERS & LOCK DOWN YOUR DIGITAL IDENTITY
Make your PC more resilient to hackers and malware, with some help from Nick Peers.
Comprehensive must-read guide: block the hackers, snoops & cyber criminals and protect your smartphone, PC & tablet from today’s online threats.
Make your PC more resilient to hackers and malware.
Once upon a time, the act of protecting your PC against viruses was simply to install an antivirus program, and watch what floppy disks and CD-ROMs you introduced to it. Then we all got internet access, and you needed to make sure you didn’t download anything dodgy, while introducing a firewall to dissuade drive-by hackers. And for a while, that seemed to be sufficient.
How times have changed — and with ever-increasing rapidity, too. Nowadays, the threats keep coming, finding ever more inventive ways of getting through defenses, using trickery as much as anything else. But however hard the hackers fight, the security folk fight back, helping develop new forms of protection, removal and repair to thwart the cybercriminals.
As it was in the beginning, prevention is always better than cure. Far better to tighten the security on your PC than have to go through the trauma of removing unwanted software, or battling a demand for thousands of dollars from a ransomware attack. But where do you begin? What software do you need? And how can you change your behaviour to minimise your exposure in the first place? In this feature, we’ll help you on all these counts.
We’ll reveal the core protection you need, plus run through the various ways in which your online activities put you at risk, and how to protect yourself accordingly. You’ll discover how to encrypt your email, properly screen downloads for viruses and potentially unwanted programs, keep malvertising at arm’s length, and ensure none of your online accounts are easily — if at all — hacked. We’ll help secure your home network, too, so people can’t piggyback on to your Wi-Fi, or gain access to your home devices through your router.
And what happens if you do get infected? Don’t worry — we’ll run through some ways in which you can wrest control of your PC back from the malware, plus point you in the direction of some useful tools that can help you recover from a ransomware attack, even to the point of potentially decrypting your precious data.
Without further ado, let’s get this (anti-malware) party started!
It goes without saying that you need anti-malware software. Windows 10 comes with Windows Defender for basic protection, but it’s outclassed by most other anti-malware tools. The best free antivirus tools include BitDefender AV Free ( www.bitdefender. com/solutions/free.html) and Panda Free AntiVirus ( www.pandasecurity.com). However, if you’re looking for more comprehensive security (including a third-party firewall), ESET Smart Security ( www.eset.com/us) is renowned, along with Kaspersky ( www.kaspersky.com), while we’ve personally relied on Norton Security ( www.norton.com) for nine years.
In the past, you could only run one antivirus app on your PC at once. These days, there exist anti-malware apps designed to work in tandem with other security software. The most visible is Malwarebytes Anti-Malware ( www.malwarebytes.org).
The free version provides scan-andremove tools, but for continuous real-time protection, and the ability to block malicious websites — vital when it comes to keeping out malvertising and potentially unwanted programs (PUPs). Speaking of PUPs, it’s worth installing a tiny, free program called Unchecky ( www.unchecky.com) to keep unwanted add-ons off your PC.
TIGHTEN UP YOUR ROUTER
One of the most effective ways of making your PC as hacker-proof as possible is to review the way you use your PC. Let’s begin by securing your PC’s connection to your network and the internet. First, your network — if you connect through Wi-Fi, make sure you have WPA2 encryption enabled in your router’s settings, and choose a strong, randomly generated password that can’t easily be remembered, if at all (write it down, and store it somewhere secure).
Worried about drive-by hackings, where people get within range of your wireless network, then attempt to gain access to it? Reduce your network’s visibility by disabling SSID Broadcast, then changing the SSID of your network to a name that’s not easy to guess. If you’re truly paranoid, enable wireless MAC filtering (use the ‘ipconfig /all’ command in a Command Prompt window to find out your PC’s MAC address, in order to whitelist it first), change your network’s IP address from the usual 192.168.0.x to 192.168.y.x (where ‘y’ is between 1 and 255), and disable DHCP.
With these settings in place, a hacker would need four things to gain access: first, your network SSID and its