Security

Let’s Talk Security 

Many moons ago, John Dvorak proposed a radical idea: if we make people get a license before they operate a car, why don’t we require the same thing before they get a computer? After all, a problem on your computer could affect everyone else on your network and, potentially, the Internet as well. While there are a sizeable number of security problems caused by holes in the operating system or an application, a goodly chunk of them require some sort of user intervention before anything can happen. In other words, most malware can’t do much of anything unless the user (that you) does something. You either have to download a particular file, open an email attachment, visit a particular webpage or something like that. John’s idea (and I generally concur) was that educated users are the best line of defense against these kinds of problems. So what can you do to keep the bad guys out of your systems? Read on and find out.

If you’re into Microsoft-bashing, the easiest solution would be to dump Windows in favor of a Mac or a Linux machine. As tempting as that may sound, most of us are more or less joined at the hip to applications that only run on Windows and we’re not terribly interested in waiting until someone gets around to porting those applications to another OS and then having to purchase those applications for the new OS.

That being said, there are applications for the Mac and for Linux that will do anything that you can do with a Windows app. In some cases those other apps may even do it better. And, in the case of Linux, many of those apps may cost no more than the time to download and install them. The single biggest exception to this is games. As much as we might wish otherwise, game publishers create games for the 90% of the market running Windows, not the 10% that are running something else. If there is a game out there that comes in both Mac and PC versions, you can bet your bottom dollar that it was successful on the PC before anyone decided to invest the time and effort to port it to the Mac.

Let us also not forget that Mac and Linux also have their problems. You just don’t hear about them as often because most malware authors spend their time writing code that affects the 90% of PCs that run some form of Windows rather than the 5% or so that run a Mac OS and the 5% or so that are some flavor of Linux.

With all of that out of the way, let’s focus on what you can do to tighten up security on your Windows machine. Perhaps a better title for this might be “Let’s Talk Windows Security.”