Software and Tools - Antivirus

The next thing on the list of things to do is a good antivirus package after you install your favourite browser and before you start serious web surfing.  Again, this is a personal preference and it all depends on what you want, need and are willing to pay for.  There are those who say it is all snake oil and useless.  They are welcome to their opinion and in my not so humble opinion it is needed.  It is another level of defense for you that will stop the known nasty software out there.  Why make it easy for hackers to take over your system and use your bandwidth to take down sites, steal your identity?  Will it be 100% effective, maybe not, but if they want to get into my system they will need to work on it and not have an open door.

There are a number of sites that do reviews and I have a list five sites I know.  There are a lot more, but, I don't know them, their methodology and if they got paid to do the reviews. 

• AV Test org
• Consumer Affairs
• PC Advisor
• PC MAG 
• PC World

For myself I was looking for an package that works in

• Windows (I still have a machine left running Windows 10)
• Android for our tablets via the Google Play store.
• Android phone.  This is a low end model with limited resources.
• Linux.

I found one common package that works very well in Windows and Android, but, right now my distro does not offer the Linux version of that product.  It does not slow down my machines, especially the low end phone and did catch crap that tried to get installed when someone sent me an email.  Avast works well enough, has a free version that does most of what I want and need.  The version does show ads, but, they are small and unobtrusive for me and don't slow my systems down.  For Linux I am looking at ClamAV as that is available in the distro of Linux I am using.  UBUNTU community has a good small page of various packages you can check out.

The Android screens looks like the following:

The Windows screens looks like the following:

Please remember, just because you are running an antivirus program you can surf wherever you want, click on anything, install anything and open questionable emails.  Nothing is 100% and safe surfing and email practices are required.  Antivirus software just gives you another level of defense.  You also should be keeping your software up to date and making regular backups (a future blog).

Year end 2008

It is now the last day of 2008 and it has been some time since I talked about spam. This year marked a real drop in the number of spam messages that I have been tracking in Yahoo, but, all my other accounts now get regular spam emails. The troubling part is that they are looking much better that a few years ago and it appears that the spammers are targeting a more select group rather than doing a blanket spam.

Since I started tracking spam mail in June 2005 I have now received a total of 17,579 emails of which 11,589 were spam. That leaves me with 5,990 (34%) of the mails were legit that I asked for. The upside is that this year 69% of my mail was legit (1,529 emails).

A few things that I keep telling everyone and bears repeating here:

1. If you get mail that purports to be from anyone asking you to re-enter or reverify your account information never click on the link provided. Go directly to their site yourself and check there.
2. Keep your firewall up-to-date and active. If you don't have a firewall get one and install it. There are a number of good free firewall packages out there.
   
3. Keep your anti-virus up-to-date and active. Again, if you don't have this software get one and install it. Like #2 there are a number of excellent packages out there for free that you can download.
   
4. Keep your Operating System (O/S) up-to-date and apply all patches immediately. It does not matter what O/S you run, keep your system up-to-date.
   
5. Keep a good set of backups. Even if you follow #2-4 hardware does fail at times and having a good current backup will go a long way to restoring all of your critical files.
6. If you get an email that sounds to good to be true... it probably is.
7. Never open up file attachments that you don't know who the sender is. Even if you know the sender, check the file first with a current virus scanner and then check with the person before trying to open the file. You are not paranoid, just prudent if you check before doing anything with that file.
8. Enable viewing of the extension of the file name. Some of the nasty packages are really '.EXE', but, shows '.ZIP' at the end of the name hoping to trick you into trying to open the package.
9. Change your passwords on a regular basis. Some people use passwords that have never changed in years, use post-it notes with the account and password or make an easily guessed password. You can make passwords that are hard to guess, but, easily remembered. If a cracker can guess your account password then they can use your identity for whatever purposes they want.
   

PCLINUX 2007

It has been over a month now that I have been using PCLINUXOS 2007 on my machine. My daughter has been running TR4, but, I left here there until I was comfortable with the new version. It has been running solidly on this machine without a glitch, almost.

The only problem I had was with the Palm M130. The application JPILOT would not make a connection to /dev/ttyUSB1 or /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/pilot no matter what I did. I checked out the forums at PCLINUXOS, but, everyone who were posting didn't have a fix at that time. Two days ago I did a google search on the problem along with the error message and I found a message on the UBUNTU forum where a person had the same problem, and the solution! The fix was to change the preferences serial rate for both jpilot and the PALM itself to 57600. Shut down jpilot and then you then initiate the sync on the palm first and then press sync on jpilot. The fix worked and all of my hardware is working. As long as you start the sync on the Pilot first jpilot will work properly.

I also found a note in the forums about SYNAPTIC and go into settings, repositories and add 'KDE' to the sections. Basically the sections should contain 'main extra nonfree kde'. I did this and KlamAV was there and I installed it on my system. I use KlamAV as I do bring work home and I like to scan the documents on a regular basis.

My next job this weekend is to update my daughter's machine and then my wife's machine will be upgraded. My wife also wants me to install SCRIBUS on her machine so she can play with it. The only application in Windows on her machine is MSPUBLISHER and she is looking for a good replacement for that application so she can be running everything from Linux.

Long distance help & Linux

I had an interesting call with my brother last week. He kept his virus scanner up-to-date, but, viruses and spyware still got through his system. I won't name the company that he uses for protection, but, my brother is a bit more than pissed off how easily his system was taken over. He paid for protection and hundreds of the little nasties still got through (yes, hundreds!). He is a bit more computer literate than the average person as he used to work on Unix systems and knows a bit more than the average person about safe computing and locking down a system. I had previously given him links to AVG and CLAMAV and he used those to start to clean his system.

I burned three Linux distros for him and I will be mailing them to him to play with.

1. PCLINUXOS V0.93 - Really good and we use this on our desktops at home. This is a good live CD for him to play with. The only thing is that CLAMAV is not part of the CD.
2. Helix 1.8 - Comes with CLAMAV. It also has a good selection of other tools that you can use for intrusion detection.
3. Insert 1.3.8 - Comes with CLAMAV. It also comes with a good selection of tools.

I have to write up a short cheat sheet for each so he can quickly use them. The upside is that he will also have a usable machine for browsing the net especially if he uses PCLINUXOS. I know the ISP he uses and they offer web based email so he can configure the PPP dialer and use Firefox to access his email.

With his latest experience on how little protection you get in Windows he may be more open to suggestions on Linux. If you are still using Windows are are interested in Linux there are a good number of 'live' distros that you can start with that don't need installing on your computer. You just pop the CD in your drive and boot up the machine. As long as you have the CD drive as a bootable device before the hard drive you are good. If you want to see more Linux distros you can try distrowatch.