Viruses and Crap in Windows, what can I do?

I was recently talking to one of the other parents from my kids’ school, and a friend of Jenn’s. She mentioned that they had just discovered that a keylogger was installed on their home computer. If you don’t know what a keylogger is, click keylogger to see the wikipedia definition. It is basically a program that watches what you are typing on your computer and sends that information to a hacker somewhere.

The keylogger was likely installed via either some ActiveX component that was on a website they visited in Internet Explorer, or in a malicious attachment they received in Outlook Express. This happened despite the fact that they have enabled automatic Windows Update, and they have a virus protection tool offered by their ISP. The person I was talking to said that the family computer geek (her brother) had suggested that they switch from Windows to Linux in order to make their computer more secure. While this will work, transitioning to Linux is daunting for non-computer-savvy people. Also, some people have Windows apps they can’t do without, despite the growing quantity of excellent software for nearly any computing task available for Linux. What can people do then to protect themselves if they still must run Windows?

Here’s my four step program for getting rid of crap on your home Windows machines:

1. Protect Windows: Make sure you have a good virus scanner that automatically updates every day. New viruses come out very quickly, sometimes on the same day that new security vulnerabilities are discovered in Windows. You must keep your scanning tools updated regularly. Also make sure you have Windows Update configured to automatically install updates on your computer right away. That will help seal up exploitable holes in your operating system.
2. Get Rid of Internet Explorer: In many computer-users’ minds, Internet Explorer is synonymous with “the Internet”. That is a huge fallacy. Mozilla Firefox is a superior web browser to IE in every way. It is more standards-compliant, much more secure, and more feature-rich than Internet Explorer. It is also free and it is collaboratively developed in the open, so many many eyes have reviewed its code for security risks. It can be dropped in to your computer to replace Internet Explorer in a few minutes. Go download it now from the link above and stop using Internet Explorer forever. All the popups, browser hijacks, and a lot of the spyware, adware and trojans will be history.
   
   
3. Get Rid of Outlook Express: The same people who think Internet Explorer is “the Internet” also tend to think that Outlook Express is the only thing out there for email. That’s also very far from the truth. For email you have a couple of choices that are better than Outlook Express. If you are willing to change your email address, you can sign up for a free Google Gmail account. Your new email address would be something@gmail.com. Gmail has excellent spam and virus filtering, and you don’t have to do anything to set it up. You just use Firefox from the previous step to get your email by going to gmail.google.com. The other nice thing about that is that your email is available to you from any computer anywhere. If you want to keep your existing email address, you can still dump Outlook Express. Those nice Mozilla people have a powerful, free, fast, secure email program for you called Thunderbird. It is developed via the same open process as Firefox, and won’t secretly install trojans, viruses and other crap on your computer without your knowledge like Outlook Express does. It has junk mail filtering, and an anti-phishing feature to protect you from email scams. Go get it here, install it, import your Outlook Express settings automatically, and get rid of almost all the rest of the viruses, spyware and trojans you are subject to.
4. Maintain Your System: Make sure your virus scanner stays up to date. Make sure you always apply the latest Windows Update patches. If you run other Microsoft applications like Office, make sure you keep it up to date too. You might also want to consider periodically running Adaware SE from Lavasoft, a free-for-personal-use adware and spyware remover, just to be safe.

If you follow these steps, you are off to a good start with safer computing, and you are also a little bit out from under the monopolistic boot-heel of Microsoft. If you have good success with Firefox and Thunderbird, you should know that there are tons of free and open-source applications out there for Windows that you can download and install for free. You can even comfortably replace any illegal copy of Microsoft Office you might be using at home with the free, excellent office suite OpenOffice.org office suite, which is just as powerful, and completely free. It is compatible with any Microsoft Office .doc or .xls or .ppt files you might have from work or friends, and it can output directly to Adobe Acrobat format without any other tools too.

If one day you get adventurous about your computing, you could try installing Linux. A good Linux for home desktops is Ubuntu. It’s not as easy as getting and using Firefox or Thunderbird, but it’s not that hard either. You back up all your stuff from your Windows computer, download an Ubuntu install CD file, burn it to CD, and reboot to install it. When you’re done, you’ll have a complete Linux system, that by the way also includes OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird right out of the box. It’s a one-stop shopping experience (minus the paying for it part).

Hope this helps some of you out there.