The Internet: The Missing Manual

Chapter 21. Staying Safe

The Internet reveals humanity both at its most glorious heights of achievement and at its downright sleaziest. As you gaze at the new moons of Pluto (as seen from the Hubble Space Telescope at http://hubble.nasa.gov), your email inbox is filling up with viruses awaiting their chance to hop onto your hard drive. Mixed in with those messages are pitches from rip-off artists and identity thieves.

Threats from the Internet fall into four broad categories: programs designed to damage the information on your hard drive (viruses, worms, and the like), software that steals personal information from your computer (spyware), hackers who break into and run programs on your computer without your knowledge, and scammers who use the Internet to take advantage of unsuspecting victims (phishing).

This chapter shows you how to protect your computer using software that detects—and deletes—malicious software code or blocks unwelcome access. It also shows you how to use your computer’s settings to control the information that flows in and out of your machine. And to help you keep your kids safe, the last section deals with parental controls.

Know Your Enemies

The steps to safeguarding your computer make more sense when you understand the nature of the threats you’re dealing with. Here’s the Internet’s Seven Most Wanted:

• Viruses. A virus is a nasty little piece of code (that is, a small program) that invades your computer without your knowledge. Like a flu bug that spreads from ...