The Chicken Little syndrome in the form of scare mongering seems to be one of the two dominant advertising concepts in our society. The second one seems to be buy my product and enjoy an optimum sex life for all eternity. All of us know that these extremes, if not actually impossible, are at least highly improbable. Still we respond like lemmings when these buttons are pushed. Both the good guys and the bad guys know this and both use the same techniques to reach us. This puts us directly behind the eight ball. We must determine for ourselves if we are being sold a bill of goods or being billed for services desired, requested, and delivered. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that in any given group (such as the members of our group) these determinations are going to be highly variable. Sometimes we’ll be right, sometimes we’ll be wrong, and sometimes we just won’t know. Nowhere is this more evident than when browsing online.

Because of the foregoing, it is not possible to achieve total security when using our computer. Using a firewall and antivirus program (and keeping them up to date) and sweeping the computer regularly with anti malware programs (usually Adaware and/or SpyBot Search & Destroy) will give protection in the high 90% region. This can be improved with more advanced techniques but these require advanced knowledge and rapidly reach the point where the increased time and inconvenience more than offsets the gain in security achieved. For those using Windows XP there is a way to make a sort of end run around this problem. It does not actually improve security but does make it easier to recover when a problem is encountered.

The technique is simple. Just create a new limited account and do your internet surfing from this account. Windows XP automatically protects its core files from events occurring in limited accounts. If you encounter one of the intractable malware programs, you can simply delete the account without saving any of the files in the account. There are some obvious problems with this technique. You must reinstall programs you’ve tested in the limited account and wish to keep (using an account with administrator privileges) and you must copy data files you wish to keep to another account. If you do not they will be lost if the account is deleted. Those of you who insist on using peer-to-peer networks should certainly use a limited account for this purpose. These programs are the source of many, if not most, of the worst malware programs.

Personally, I believe that the only real protection against any kind of catastrophic failure is using disk image backups stored on removable media (USB or Fire Wire hard drive by preference). Using these images you can restore your computer to the configuration it was in when the backup was made. These backups are fast (made to a hard drive) usually taking only 15 or 20 minutes including a verification pass. They can even be scheduled to occur automatically with the right software and hardware configuration. Such backups do not negate the need to do everything you can to prevent the occurrence of problems in the first place but they do offer (in my opinion) the only practical, rapid, and reliable way to recover from said catastrophic failures.

CAG