computers

Computer security is one essential step to do if you don’t want to be hacked or to have a slow PC. There are lots of lots of solution, both free and paid ones. There is many different opinions of what is the best software, but I’m gonna show you how I have it set up.

Browser: Firefox

I use Firefox for it’s many ways of customization. Some of the plugins I gonna show you also depends on Firefox.

Antivirus: Avast! Free Antivirus

I have tried several paid and free antivirus softwares, like cloud AV, F-Secure, Avira, and none has been as good as Avast! is. With it’s recent update to the UI it makes it much more easier to use. It got a lot of protection that I haven’t seen in any other free antivirus software. Filesystem protection, webscan, emailscan, P2P protection, IM protection, network protection, some sort of UAC-like protection. All for free. If I would happen to download a virus from the net, avast! will instantly block the connection as it discovers the virus.

Browser plugin: Adblock+

Lots of ads contain virus and other malware. They also can be very annoying. To get rid of them, both for a cleaner and safer web, I use Adblock+. I do encourage you to disable Adblock+ on your favorite sites to show them some support.

Browser plugin: Web Of Trust

Web Of Trust warns you about bad sites. It doesn’t only warn you about viruses, but for scams and other phishing attacks too. It’s better than siteadvisor as it classes the sites per sub-domain, not per domain. Because a sub-domain is doing something bad doesn’t mean the rest of the domain is bad (like on free hosts when there are several users on a domain).

That is all you need for a safe computer. And maybe a firewall, but I can’t suggest any firewall as I don’t use one as my router has a built-in one.

Why no no-script?

In my opinion no-script is pretty useless. Most if not all websites uses javascript for functionality and design. When one come over a site that doesn’t work, they allow javascript without checking what the javascript does anyway, and that defeats the purpose. Also, if you were gonna have a virus downloaded by javascript, avast! is there to block it as it has a web scanner that scans everything downloaded.