Safe Computing Environment

The first area to be concerned about in terms of security would be to build up a safe computing environment. I'll not touch much on the physical environment of your computer. Those are generally common sense precautions that you take to protect your own asset. When you take actions to protect your physical home, you are essentially protecting your property that are in your home, as well as your own physically safety. Your computer environment is a virtual space, and the property you will be protecting is information asset. To make it more real, you will be protecting your identity, your confidential information such as information related to your credit cards , bank accounts, social security numbers, just to name a few.

Let us look briefly at the different areas whereby the security of your computing environment could be compromised. As I have mentioned before, the person trying to get into your computer does not need to be physically at your computer. He could be thousands of miles away attacking from the safety of his own home. Most of the time, the computer owner would be completely unaware of the intrusion. However just as a crime committed in the physical world would always leave behind evidence, such virtual intrusion will also leave behind "finger prints", that can be traced by an expert in the field. Before we look into catching the intruder, it would be more appropriate to look into how to protect yourself from possible attacks. What forms of attacks are common these days?

Holes in your computing environment. Not physical holes but virtual ones which can found in operating system like Windows XP, in software that you use. Every system has holes and will be exploited eventually. A good example would be the iPhone which was already hacked after being released for less than a month.

Computer virus is one of them. New viruses are created everyday that even the antivirus vendors have difficulty keeping up. They have certainly become a menace today for computer users. Simple precaution can certainly help to reduce the possibility of your computer getting infected.

Spywares and Adwares, like viruses, are being created everyday. Like viruses they are a menace, and cause plenty of frustration to the computer users. Generally spywares and adwares propagate themselves by tricking the users to initiate a certain action which would then cause them to be installed on your computer. Viruses on the other hand could infect you without you even initiate anything, as long as you are connected to other computers over the network, such as the Internet.

Wifi vulnerability. Wifi usage has become more and more common these days due to the dropping prices of wifi routers. It offers a type of convenience that makes it an attractive equipment to have around the home. You can move around the house with your laptop and still have Internet connection, without the cumbersome wires and cables that were once a part of the landscape. And with Wifi, it could also mean you could be leaving the door opened to your computer for the hacker who could just be sitting in his car 100 feet away from your house. And you wouldn't even know about it.

Next I will talk about the tasks to do to promote a safe computing environment.