Anti Virus & Firewalls

[Flanker]

Blimey, the more I look into this the more scary it can look. After my little scare with the bear virus e-mail, I thought I had better review my system. I have had loads of e-mails and files from other Ribnet members, I just think that it is important that everyone is aware of what is out there, I would not want to infect anyones PC by sending a virus I had received. I put this thread on here as this is the read area and at least people can review thier own system. All help offered by those Ribnet members more able in this field would be appreciated by less able people such as me and others who are not so PC literate.

Thanks for the offerings so far.

Pete

[crazyhorse]

Im running windows 98 and I have Picolow software for pictures.

I want to copy and send a picture to Rib.net and when I save it to my desktop ,it saves it as a word doc.When I try and Transfer it to a live Ribnet post it turnes into a picture and the post vanishes.What am I doing wrong and is my windows desktop set up wrong?any help would be appreciated.It seems I cant send a picture,Im sure this isnt correct and Im no pc whizz.

Thanks Crazyhorse

[Ribald]

According to "ShieldsUp" my computor (running Norton Internet Security) is un-healthly secure - in fact it almost implies the thing does not exist at all

Pete

I have just renewed my subscription for £24.95 - quite painless.

[Flanker]

ribald,

Did you go for the Firewall, and what is one of those anyway? I have an idea that it prevents things coming in to the computer but what is the difference between that and the normal virus stuff. I have also seen comments on here about bl..dy firewalls, what was all that about, does it cause problems?

Pete

[Pete7]

Pete have a look at this:

www.zonelabs.com

Work your way through the site and avoid buying the pro version. You will eventually end up at the free version, just down load it and install. Then click through the options and choose the highest security settings for everthing.

It will throw up warning messages that your pc is being probed about one a hour. Most are quite normal where your pc and the routers (like "telephone exchanges") are talking to each other to see if there is anyone there I think, but some may not be. I have a French server probing my pc at the moment. Their IP address doesn't give the name of the web site which is a little worrying, like what are they hidding ?

Pete
(With Shields Up and flak jacket on)

[Manos]

Zonelabs is the best. Better even when you get the paltinum version.

[Alex Brown]

To be perfectly honest, if you're running any of the windows variants, provided they are all kept fully upto date with security patches, the system should pretty much be fine...... also, if you have things like IIS removed after install, and then make sure your dial up connection does not connect anything other than basic tcp, which means no file/print sharing, or client for microsoft networks ticks on then again mostly it should be fine.

Although I am currently sat behind an ISDN router which uses Network Address Translation (NAT), before having this, I never once used any firewalling products, since they became a nuisance, blocking ports here there and everywhere

What I do believe in strongly now is Symantec Norton Antivirus, provided it's kept fully upto date, this is a very very handy bit of software to be had, especially the 2002 version onwards, which includes scanning of outgoing e-mail (SMTP) as well as incoming (POP3).

-Alex (virus free for now...)