Greetings,

There are essential tools that we recommend for safeguarding your personal and/or business computer in today's internet environment. Even if you are a limited access internet user these tools are essential for your protection.

Each and every time you log onto the internet you create a connection that can be sensed by other computers running various software programs that are readily available to most anyone who looks for them. Some of these sniffers are harmless simply wanting to track what you do on the internet to compile marketing research data. Others are malicious seeking to invade your computer to secure sensitive and personal information that can be used in a variety of ways against the individual. Identity and credit card theft being two examples that make the news regularly.

We believe the following recommendations will prevent 95% of anything malicious that is targeted at you , your business and your personal and business computers. Tools like these are absolutely essential to protect yourself and your computers. We offer these suggestions as direction to places you can get protection and accept no liability for your decision to apply these methods.

1) First and foremost you must have a constantly updated virus protection program. If you are relying on manual updating of your virus software your computer is highly susceptible to attacks by malicious content from web pages and SPAM e-mail. While we do not endorse any specific software there are several reliable and reputable vendors available to any consumer today.

2) Second you should have some type of fire wall installed on your computer. If you do not have a fire wall of some type installed on your computer you are most likely being invaded by hostile computers without your knowledge. Fire walls are a challenge to get used to and you will need to read the instructions carefully on whatever solution you decide to use. Again while we do not endorse any specific software there are several reliable and reputable vendors available to any consumer today.

3) Third you will need some type of spyware sniffer. Spyware is also known as scumware and is an invasive form of software that piggybacks itself through shareware and freeware as well as planted by web sites as you surf the internet. Spyware can do an immense amount of damage and occupy substantial system resources all without you knowledge or knowing consent. Spyware is currently legal.

Spyware is sometimes installed by some but not all shareware or freeware programs. These programs provide an acceptance and consent clause buried deeply in the fine print, you know all that real small text you never bother to read. Spyware is also sometimes planted by a web site in the form of a cookie as your browser surfs the site. (Yahoo is a fine example of this method). Many web sites require cookies to be enabled in your browser allowing the Spyware to be planted while you are doing your normal routine surfing. Spyware in not a virus or active attack against your computer therefore virus software and fire walls do not block them.

We have yet to find a business or personal computer that has been free of spyware. An exception to the freeware rule is our recommended software for sniffing out spyware. The program is called Ad-aware, it is free and can be found at www.lavasoft.de. It is a quick download and one worthwhile to have on your machine. We highly recommend you run Ad-aware before doing any on-line banking or other sensitive business via the Internet.

The drawback to installing this protection is the amount of system resources required to maintain them while your computer is on line. Ad-aware is a run when required program whereas the fire wall and virus programs run in real time. We recommend that you have a minimum of 256MB of RAM to effectively run these applications. There is no such thing as to little RAM. Computers with 128MB of RAM or less usually will experience a significant loss of performance while attempting to run an active virus protection program and/or fire wall.