From the Associated Press this morning-
Internet users at home are not nearly as safe online as they believe, according to a nationwide inspection by researchers. They found most consumers have no firewall protection, outdated antivirus software and dozens of spyware programs secretly running on their computers.
One beleaguered home user in the government-backed study had more than 1,000 spyware programs running on his sluggish computer when researchers examined it
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You need anti virus software (Panda is very good, and less of a target for hackers than Norton and other more well known brands). You need a firewall - Zone Alarm - is free. Although if you're running Windows XP and have installed the new SP2, the firewall it provides is adequate. You do NOT want to run two firewalls.
You should have two programs on your computer to block and detect spyware...both are free.
Spybot Search and Destroy and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware.
I also run SpyBlaster. It's also free.
This ends today's Geek Alert!
