February 7th, 2010
Recently, many anti-scam websites have been subject to denial of service (DDoS) attacks by fraudsters. Believe it or not, are not so protected by using computers to perform the DDoS attack. The innocent people unwittingly helping these people irresponsible to carry out the attack. This computer is called "zombies" and the team of zombies are computers infected with viruses or Trojan and used by fraudsters to carry out the DDoS attack.
The virus or trojan that opens a backdoor on the target computer to hackers so that he or she will have access to the destination computer. In some cases, hackers will sell access to another person and that person will use to access any purpose that you like. If a spammer has access to your computer, you will use to send spam messages.
The DDoS attack is performed by the scammers by sending useless data in a specific web server and when the server can not handle the data flow, it will crash. This is what is happening now in the fight against many scam websites.
This is only one thing that hackers can do when your computer is not protected. If I go to the list of what computers can do so not protected, it will be a long list. Therefore, we must protect our computer. However, some protection has a high price and some are free. In this article, I'll tell you where you can get a good optimum equipment protection without paying a penny.
1. Antivirus
Your computer needs an antivirus. A good antivirus will have real time protection, detection rate is good and easy to use. If you have no antivirus on your PC, get one. Antivirus can find and remove viruses and trojans from your PC. There are three that I personally recommend antivirus. Avast! Antivirus, AVG and Avira AntiVir Personal Edition.
2. Firewall
Firewall is important to block incoming or outgoing traffic. If you have malware on your computer, you will be able to send information from your computer and firewall will be able to block it. When you buy a new PC, I suggest you to activate the Windows firewall before going online. Although Windows Firewall can not protect certain malicious threats completely, but good enough to protect you before installing a new firewall. After that, you need to find a good firewall and install on your system. I personally recommend two free firewalls. Comodo Firewall Pro and ZoneAlarm.
3. Spybot Search and Destroy
Spybot Search and Destroy is good at finding spyware, malware and adware threats in your PC. It also has some real time protection and best of all, it's free. It has good detection rate and can detect keyloggers into your computer.
4. Ad-Aware 2007
Ad-Aware 2007 Free has been used by 250 million people, providing good protection. If you have some money to spend, consider upgrading to Ad-Aware 2007 Plus because it has real time protection. But the free edition is good enough if it is set in the budget. But it takes a little more work because you have to perform manual examination and has no real time protection.