In today’s times, an increasing amount of people are using their personal computers for everything from e-mail to banking and investing to shopping. While doing these things on a regular basis, we tend to open ourselves up to potential hackers, and malicious attacks.  Some potential hackers could be looking to phish your personal information and identity for resale and others simply may just want to use your computer as a stage from where they could attack other non suspecting targets.  Below are a few easy, cost-effective measures that you can take to prevent this from happening to you.

1. Make frequent backups of your data and store them in a separate location.
2. Be sure to update and patch your operating system, web browser and software frequently.
3. Install a good firewall.  Firewalls will protect open ports on your computer that are exposed to the internet.  Be sure to consider the differences between a software firewall and a hardware firewall.
4. Check your browser and email settings for optimal security.  Active-X and JavaScript are often used by hackers to install malicious programs to your computer.  While cookies are fairly harmless in terms of security concerns, but they will still track your movements on the Internet to build a profile of you.  A good practice is to set your security settings for the “internet zone” to High, and your “trusted sites zone” to Medium Low.
5. Install antivirus software and make sure to set the automatic updates on a schedule so that it will keep up to date with the latest virus databases.
6. Be very cautious of strange email with attachments.  It’s not always enough that you recognize the sender’s email addresses because many viruses can spread from a familiar address.
7. Do not execute programs from an unknown source.  In addition, do not send these types of programs to people that you know because they contain funny or amusing stories or jokes.  They may contain a Trojan horse that can infect a computer.
8. Disable hidden filename extensions.  By default, the Windows operating system is set to “hide file extensions for known file types”.  Set this option so that file extensions will display in Windows.  Some file extensions will remain, but you are more likely to see any curious file extensions that seem out of place.
9. Power down your computer when you are not using it.  A hacker can not compromise your computer when the computer is off.
10. Make a boot disk on a floppy disk or a usb thumb drive just in case your computer is damaged or hacked by a malicious program.  Clearly, you need to do this before you experience a hostile breach of your system.