The only way to keep your computer 100% safe is to not use it. With enough technical knowledge, however; you can achieve a safety level that's pretty decent … but that post belongs on a different blog with a different audience—and would preferably be written by an actual security expert. Today, we'll just be looking at some basic things you can do to at least get your security level out of the toilet.

Phishing

This is probably the most basic of attack methods. Some Indian cunt rings you up and tells you they've detected a virus coming from you computer, or some Nigerian dickhead sends you an email asking you to help them secure a small fortune, or some Ukrainian fuckwit sends you an email from "your bank" along with a dodgy link. I'm sure you've all seen this sort of thing before.

Be on guard when it comes to emails. Don't click on links to any site that you then have to log into. Also, don't do a Google search for your bank and then blindly click on the first link that comes up. Enter addresses directly into your browser's address bar, or use a bookmark.

The dodgy phone calls—I'm sure you're smart enough to handle on your own.

On a side note; I would like to encourage you not to leave too much personally identifiable information laying around the internet. Highly-skilled con-artists can use it to bluff their way into all sorts of things, including taking control of your phone-number (yes, people have taken over other people's phone-numbers by simply bullshitting a Telecom employee). This is ONE reason why phone based authentication (we'll text you a code) is a bad idea.

Trojans

A trojan is a nasty piece of software that hides in a host file, and then runs when you open said file. They often come in emails, attached to .doc and .pdf files.

Be wary of email attachments, even those that come from people you know. Your mates probably aren't trying to infect you, but you never know what they've been doing with their machines. Also, if you're using a stand-alone email client, have it set to display as plain-text rather than HTML, and make sure it doesn't open attachments automatically. And don't use Microsoft Outlook if you can help it.

Worms

These are probably the scariest of the lot, because the only thing you have to do to catch one is hook your computer up to the internet (or even an intranet). These buggers crawl networks under their own power, looking for vulnerable machines to infect. The only thing you can do is have defences sufficient enough to keep them out.

First of all, don't use Windows XP. Second, keep your operating system up to date. Every operating system vendor releases security patches. Install them.

Apart from that, it's hard to give reasonable advice that normal people will be able to follow. If your internet comes in through a desktop router, you need to keep that secure up to date as well (yes, worms also infect routers), but this isn't something that most folks know how to do on their own. A firewall is a good idea—but again—most folks don't know how to configure one properly.

One thing I would recommend is going to Steve Gibson's grc.com/shieldsup and running a scan to see how visible your network is from the internet. Unfortunately, most people aren't going to have the skills to act on this info, but it's handy to know anyway.

Browser Exploits

This is the big one. See, web browsers are becoming operating systems in their own right. You can already kind of see where this is going by looking at Google's Chrome-book laptops—which are basically the first step towards replacing the operating system with the browser entirely. Think about it: apart form rendering HTML, they also open picture, video and audio files; PDF files; increasingly, they have 3D rendering and real-time peer-to-peer networking capabilities; and of course, they run code. Some websites now, are more functional than applications running directly on the desktop. People even build virtual-machines to play old video games directly in the browser. In fact, almost every time you load a web page these days, your browser is downloading and rendering multimedia content and executing computer code and doing all sorts of rubbish behind the scenes that you wouldn't believe. What this means, is that it takes a LOT of software to make a decent web browser; and as we've already discussed, the more software you have, the more exploits you inevitably end up with.

Unfortunately, this also means that every single web page you visit is a possible source of infection. Some cyber-crims specifically target web-servers; the intention being that once they infect a web-site, they can then infect everybody who visits said web-site with a vulnerable browser. Others go after ad-networks; creating infected advertisements, that then get run on any website that uses said ad-network. And then—of course—there's the web-sites that are just run by scummy cunts who are out to get you. A lot of porn site fall into this category.

First of all don't use Internet Explorer. I dunno about Edge, but in any case, I'd stick with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari—for the Mac users. Second, keep your browser up to date. Every good browser vendor releases security patches. Install them.

Third, avoid websites that you think might be a bit dodgy. I know, it's hard to know if something looks dodgy until you've been there. Just use your common sense.

Content blocking. It's a touchy subject in the online world, but, well, fuck the online world—I'm more interested in keeping nasty shit of my computer. I have recommended in the past—and continue to recommend—uBlock Origin by Raymond Hill. By default, it functions more or less like a traditional ad-blocker, but it also has an advanced mode, which lets you block anything and everything you want to (as well as the stuff you probably don't). Personally, I think it's well worth playing with until you get the hang of it. That way, you can block everything by default, and then selectively enable only the stuff you want on the websites where you want it. uBlockO runs in Firefox and Chrome. For me, I do most of my browsing inside a virtual machine; but in my opinion, content blocking is the best and most reasonable course of action for a majority of the normies out there.

A brief word about anti-virus software

There isn't a single commercial anti-virus product on the market today that I would recommend to regular home users. If you're running an email server or something … maybe. You know how we've talked about all software having bugs? Well, guess what anti-virus software is made of. Yes, these days, people actually write computer viruses that target anti-virus software.

If you're using MS Windows, just use their Security-Essentials package; it's as good as anything else on the market.

Okay, I think that wraps it up. Questions down bellow, etc—I'm off to bed now. G'night.