Introduction to safe computing practices

There was a time when safe computing means simply protecting your computer physically. If your computer is not physically accessible to others, you are pretty safe. Unless of course someone stole your computer or something. But when you connect to other computers, you are now open to a world of security risks. You may ask,"how am I connected to other computers? My computer is sitting nicely in a room in my own home. I don't see any other computer nearby. and so where is this connection? "

In this age of the Internet, if you use the Internet for whatever purposes, you are now one among the millions of computers connected together worldwide, even if you don't see this connection physically. Now that also mean it is now possible for someone to access your computer without physically being at your computer. If you have never given much thought to security in the past nor taken any security measures to protect your computer, it is even possible that someone may be accessing your computer right this very minute, without you ever having the slightest clue that it is happening. And that person could be accessing from thousands of miles away somewhere in the Eastern Europe or Asia or even the Antarctica. And that is not a difficult feat for someone who has some hacking knowledge that are freely available on the Internet.

Am I not being overly paranoid about this? I guess you could say that, except for the fact I once discovered someone had gained access to the harddisk on my computer without my knowledge. At least up to that point. What had happened was someone was using my computer as a half way house to store his or her files, which was then used to be shared with others. To make the experience even more humbling, this happened to me, a computer techie, mind you.

Now having said all that, I would like to add that there is no such thing as a 100% secured computer or network. If someone wants to hack into your computer for whatever reason, he or she will probably succeed if he or she tries hard enough by probing every security holes on your system. We may not stop birds flying over our heads but we can sure stop them from pooping on us. So, for computer security, we can take simple measures to prevent someone from just walking right into our computer, the same way we take precautions to deter someone from simply walking into our homes and take whatever he wants.

We'll take a look at some of the areas of security concerns and take basic security measures to minimize the risk of your computer becoming compromised.