Foreword By The Editor

In this article by Louise Goldstein, a number of important security issues related to the modern Internet, or Web 2.0, as it is commonly known nowadays, are brought into focus. Modern technology is incredibly complex but is now in general use everywhere and its ubiquity is part of the problem. The bad guys are still out there and they are finding ever more ways to attack us. Vigilance has never been more important than now.
Mike Alexander
Author of ‘Internet Traps, Ripoffs And Pitfalls‘

The Modern Internet

Image via Wikipedia

The Internet has given birth to a lot of new possibilities. It is a worldwide marketplace, a communication gateway, a networking venue, and a lot more. However, it has also opened us up to new dangers: viruses, trojans, and many other kinds of Internet malware are all over cyberspace, ready to launch an attack on whoever is vulnerable.

The first line of defense is knowing the enemy. So take a look at these latest Internet security threats. You just might meet one of them one of these days.

Scareware

Malware today are often disguised as anti-virus software and anti-spyware. Take, for instance, Vista Spyware 2011, Windows Restore, and Microsoft Security Center 2011. These software pretend to scan your computer then pretend to find viruses and registry problems and other stuff that should scare you into paying for the software to clean up your computer. (That’s why they are called scareware: because they scare you).

But in truth, the viruses and registry issues were never there in the first place, so you end up spending money to fix troubles your computer never really had.

LizaMoon

This is another scareware that is causing problems for millions of Internet users.

As of March 31, 2011, this malware has been found crawling on more than 500,000 web sites and has shown to be one of the most rapidly spread virus attacks in Internet history. What is worse, this virus not only tricks you into paying for basically useless software, it has also been reported to drain its victims’ credit cards.

Mobile Phones And Social Networks

Mobile phones and social networks are popular new targets for online attacks. Facebook and Twitter users are particularly vulnerable because the messages that contain malicious links come labeled with the names of people they know and trust, so they are more likely to click on these links.

URL Shorteners have also become common tools for driving people to malicious sites, as you never really know what you are clicking on until you reach the site in question.

Mobile phones are popular targets these days. After all, as Denis Maslennikov, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, explains, “Any mobile device, be it a smartphone or a basic mobile phone, has a direct connection to its owner’s money via their mobile account”.

Router Attack

While you are worrying about the safety of your computer or your web site, by the way, you might want to worry about your router as well. Hackers who have become bored with taking down Web servers through traffic flooding are now shifting their attention to routers, taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of the Border Gateway Protocol to take servers down. Unfortunately, there is not as yet a quick-and-easy way to protect routers from hacking.

In addition to implementing tighter authentication processes, filtering direct traffic better, and getting tools to detect and trace attacks, ISPs and carriers need to band together and, as a group, implement a protocol that will tighten overall security. This will prevent hackers from infiltrating a secured ISP by tunneling through a trusted-but-less-secure ISP network.

Protecting Yourself

For most of us, the best and easiest way to protect ourselves online is by investing in good quality Internet protection software. If you are low risk, meaning you don’t download a lot of stuff and seldom click on links, you can survive on a free one and there are many good free anti-malware programs from reputable companies out there.

However, if you love to download files, be they movies, PDFs, and most especially, software, or if you like to click links on Twitter or Facebook, you should definitely invest in a good, paid Internet security software. Never trust pop-ups that claim to find more problems than your reputable antivirus has warned you about.

Malware may have grown more sophisticated these days, but anti-virus companies have likewise grown smarter. There is no reason why you should be out in the cold when it comes to online protection.

About The Author

To be sure you are always protected you should have antivirus software installed on your computer. Antivirus review sites will keep you updated with the latest information on viruses.

Foreword By The Editor

This article by Billy Duncan is a straightforward treatise on dealing with one of the commonest problems encountered by computer users (especially new ones): registry errors. Be sure to follow the links in his ‘bio’ at the end of the article if you have more than a passing interest in this topic.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

Database

Foreword By The Editor

Jason Kendall gives an appraisal of the employment environment available now and in the future for people interested in the Information Technology field in the UK. He also covers the area of home study for those considering entering the field professionally. The opportunities are immense and, even though he is pushing a particular solution in CompTIA, his article is a fair representation of  of what is generally available there and what to look out for if you are an IT wannabe anywhere.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

The Technological Environment

Many people simply don’t understand what information technology (IT) is doing for all of us. It’s thrilling, changing, and means we’re all part of a huge step forward in technology that will impact the world for generations to come. There are people who believe that the technological advancement we are experiencing is slowing in pace. Nothing could be more wrong. We are still still about to experience the most incredible advances and, as a result, the internet is going to significantly dominate our future existence.

The Future Of IT

Putting first things first, the remuneration for working in IT is nothing to scoff at. Typical pay rates throughout Britain for an average IT professional are already considerably more than the national average. Chances are that you’ll earn a whole lot more than you’d have any chance of earning doing other work. As the IT industry continues to grow, both nationally and internationally, it’s a sure bet that the requirement for well trained and qualified IT technicians will continue to increase for many years to come.

IT Training Courses

Considering how a program is ‘delivered’ is often missed by many potential students. How many parts is the training broken down into? What is the order and how fast does each element come? By and large, you’ll enrol in a course that takes between and one and three years and gets posted a section at a time; from one exam to the next. While this may sound logical on one level, consider this:

• What if there turn out to be reasons why you can’t finish every single section?
• What if the prescribed order of sections doesn’t suit you?
• What if, through no fault of your own, you can’t meet the required timescales and consequently do not get all your materials?

The perfect answer, of course, is to have a copy of their prescribed order of study but to receive all the materials in one go, up-front. Everything is then in your possession should you not complete it at their required pace.

Importance Of Accreditation

It only makes sense to consider training programmes that will lead to commercially acknowledged exams. There’s an endless list of trainers promoting minor ‘in-house’ certificates which will prove virtually unusable in today’s commercial market. If the accreditation doesn’t have the backing of a company like Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe or CompTIA, then it most likely won’t be commercially viable: it’ll be an unknown commodity.

Shopping Around

At the top of your shopping list for a training program should be round-the-clock support by professional mentors and instructors. So many companies only offer a basic nine till six support period (maybe later on certain days) with very little availability over the weekend.

You’ll find yourself waiting ages for an answer from email based support, and telephone support is usually to a call-centre that will just take down the issue and email it over to their technical team. Then (with a bit of luck) they will call back sometime over the next twenty four hours, and at a time suitable to them, not you. This is all next to useless if you are lost and confused and only have a specific time you can study.

Conclusion

As long as you look hard and diligently, you will find top providers that give students online support all the time, including evenings, nights and weekends. If you accept anything less than direct-access 24/7 support, you’ll regret it very quickly. You might not want to use the service late in the night, but consider weekends, early mornings or late evenings.

About The Author

Try Comptia Training or Click HERE. Copyright 2009 S. Edwards.

Foreword By The Editor

The following article by Benjamin Williams is a brief overview of two of the most serious malware problems in existence today: adware and spyware. The reason they are almost always spoken of together is because, in the real world, they so often operate in tandem. Rarely will you discover one infection without the other. The reason is that originally spyware was used mainly to provide ‘market profile’ data to adware owners.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

Symptoms

We are all familiar with spies and covert operations that exist in wartime or in politically tense regions. Now however, you can find spies and covert procedures taking over your own computer system as you use it to access the Internet.

Have you noticed a suspicious slowing down of your computer’s processing power without any particular reason? Are you sometimes bombarded with unsolicited pop-up ads that indiscriminately appear whether you are running a program or not? These are the symptoms to look out for and they may continue to happen despite checking your system, running your recently updated anti-virus program and/or running a diagnostics program on your computer. Unless you have a very efficient program to deal with it, you may not even be able to detect that the real problem in your system is the presence of adware and/or spyware.

Adware

Adware is often bundled with freeware or shareware and is unsolicited software that displays advertisements. Yes, sometimes things that seem to be too good to be true turn out to have unwanted invisible strings attached. Adware companies sometimes pay freeware or shareware creators to be able to access their programs and then prey on the unsuspecting individuals who download these programs. Adware causes unsolicited pop up advertisements to appear on your computer and, in severe cases, can cause them to pop up soon as you boot your system.

Spyware

The term ‘spyware’, on the other hand, refers to something more covert and usually undetected in your system until you run an anti-spyware program. Spyware is used exactly as its name implies; to spy on you. In relatively mild cases, it is used to track your Internet browsing habits so that it can report your preferences to a central database and build a marketing profile. What this means is that as you go about your normal Internet business, you are unwittingly under surveillance and your basic right to privacy is being impinged upon.

Malware Overview

What’s worse though, is that this malware (the term for virtually any kind of malevolent software) can take note of your keystrokes or take note of your credit card number or take note of other vital information on your PC that can be used to steal your identity or generally put your security at risk.

A recent study indicated that as many as nine out every ten computers are, or have been, infected with spyware or adware at some time. To make sure that you are not one of statistical majority, you need run an adware and spyware cleaner to detect unwanted security and privacy breaches within your system.

Remedies

Luckily, adware and spyware removal software is readily available and most will completely remove these unwanted programs from your computer. You must note however, that some adware and spyware programs are so intricately bundled within their parent programs that cleaning them out from your computer will disable the so-called ‘legitimate’ programs they infect. This consequence is nevertheless necessary to clean your computer of unwanted malware. You should choose a cleaner that can also work proactively also to prevent future installation of these types of nuisance.

Software for fighting adware and spyware works in the same way as anti-virus programs, except that they target adware and spyware. Considering the trouble that malware creators take to ensure that extracting installed adware and spyware from your computer system will be difficult, the adage about an ounce of prevention being worth more than a pound of cure applies in this situation. Be sure to install a reliable and secure adware and spyware cleaner in your system to remove existing security and privacy risks as well as preventing future hassles.

About The Author

The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel Classes in London and all over the UK.

Foreword By The Editor

Registry cleaners can be extremely useful tools and should be used regularly, especially by those without a lot of experience in good computer management. This article by Susan Reynolds covers this topic well and clarifies some issues that are not always apparent to the computer illiterate.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

Tools For The Job

Registry-cleaning programs are getting more and more popular these days, and for good reason. They’re a crucial tool for repairing computers. As a computer repairman, I personally use a registry cleaner in four out of five house calls! There are a lot of different reasons for this, and I’ll tell you the major ones here.

Probably the topmost reason is that I know they enhance the system’s overall performance. Many computers have some errors during start-up or shut down. Not all of them necessarily show up as errors though.

Causes Of Common Errors

One of the most common reasons for these types of errors is uninstalled start-up programs. The computer expects it to be run on start-up but it doesn’t exist anymore. However, the registry still thinks it does and still calls for it. Sometimes it can just be as simple as a wrong file path. A nice easy scan with a registry cleaner will fix these kinds of problems without much trouble, and I usually wipe out those little things before I even start getting to any major problems with a computer.

More Tools

In many scenarios, registry cleaners do not just act just as registry cleaners but also contain many other tools in them. For instance, nearly all registry cleaners contain a missing or broken links verifier. It is a fact that missing links on the computer can increase the boot time, thereby making it sluggish, even though many people are not aware of it. Also in the event that you attempt to open a folder that contains broken link then the computer would be too slow in opening that folder.

This also applies to start-up managers. Although computer geeks would make use of ‘msconfig’, if you do not have a fair idea about it then it may cause great problems for you. Registry cleaners are expert at completing this process and most of them do not even show up the important Windows start-up files so that you do not commit a mistake.

Most registry cleaners also contain a junk file remover tool to remove all the sites, cookies, photos, pictures and many other types of data saved to your computer on different parts of the hard drive. Getting rid of such files would definitely enhance the speed of the computer and show a significant improvement in its performance. Even though Windows has a junk file cleaning tool internally built into it, it is not unfortunately very effective.

Summary

Take all those features into account and you’d be crazy not to have a decent registry-cleaning program on hand to run when you need it. It’s just so convenient, why would you ever want to be without it? It can save you a chunky repair bill, and a great deal of stress.

About the Author

Susan Reynolds is a content editor for a leading Spyware And Adware Removal Software brand. For more information visit: http://www.spywareremovaldoc.com.

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Foreword By The Editor

Five laptop upgrades you can do yourself are covered in this excellent article by Francua Smith. Most people, even those who are basically familiar with the workings of their tower PC, do not realize how easy it is to keep a laptop in good order. If you are one of those, the following processes will probably help.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

Tired Laptop Needs A Tune-Up?

Do you have an aged laptop which you feel is in need of an upgrade? Well, the possibilities for upgrading an existing laptop are, fortunately, quite good. From Bluetooth to wireless adapters, extra RAM to a fresh tough drive, there are many things you can do to upgrade your existing laptop. In this article we will lookat five laptop upgrades you can do very simply yourself, without taking the machine to the manufacturer.

Upgrade Number One

Increase the memory of your laptop. Now, dollar for dollar, increasing your system’s RAM is the most value for money upgrade you can perform. If your Windows Vista is chugging along with a lot of hard disk swapping and slowing down terribly, pump in another 2 GB of RAM and watch what happens. You’ll be amazed at the speed improvement. Head over to Crucial.com to check out some good laptop RAM deals.

Upgrade Number Two

Install a new hard drive. Another favorite improvement can be the laptop tough drive. I used to have a miserable 60 GB tough drive in one of my aged laptops and I can say to you now that in this day of enormous videos and MP3 music, 60 GB is not enough. Do yourself a favor and improve that tough drive to something like 160 GB. The other option is to get an external tough drive (say a 320 GB monster) and then you can forget about running out of tough drive space.

Upgrade Number Three

Arrange Bluetooth connectivity. Bluetooth technology is incorporated in some laptops but not others. For laptops without in-built Bluetooth, you can buy a USB dongle with Bluetooth capability from any good computer shop. This usually comes with some software which allows you to install Bluetooth capability into your laptop. Very important for those you like to synch their Bluetooth enabled mobile phones to their laptop.

Upgrade Number Four

Get a laptop stand. Ok, this is not precisely an upgrade, but I find laptop stands increasingly the favored improvement with the mobile computing crowd. Laptop stands are good for your posture and some of them also allow your laptop to cool better. It’s surely a fine ‘upgrade’ to assume, whether you leave your laptop at home a lot or not. Just plonk the laptop stand on the desk and you’ll be able to enjoy better computing without ruining your posture from then on.

Upgrade Number Five

Invest in an extra battery. If you’re on the road a lot, you should really consider buying an extra battery. In particular, if your laptop runs out of battery juice quickly, a second battery is almost a must. I bought an extra battery for my ThinkPad X61 and I can sit at a cafe typing away for 8 solid hours, without requiring a recharge. Heaven!

Conclusion

Well, now you know about five laptop upgrades you can easily perform yourself. The next time you feel your laptop needs a bit of a tune up, look to the above list and see what components you can upgrade. Sometimes a small upgrade (especially additional RAM) will do wonders for your laptop and overall computing experience. By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about the ins and outs of laptops, you may want to check out my laptop guide.

About the Author

Francua Smith is a computer specialist who has a lot of experience on laptop computers. He will help you to choose your own good laptop computer.