Personal Firewalls | Antivirus Protection | Encryption

"What you need is a giant condom for your computer." - Winn Schwartau

You can beat the most common computer security troubles with just three easy programs: a personal firewall, antivirus, and encryption.

Personal Firewalls

Someone hacked into the files of a friend with whom I correspond through e-mail. They took personal information about my 5 year old daughter who was killed about 3 years ago, and have been sending e-mails to both my friend and myself using my daughter's name (it was a very unusual Cherokee name), and talking about "death" watching us, etc…

Firewalls for home computers are a recent development. The main reason is a new phenomenon. In recent years thousands of people have discovered how easy it is to party nasty inside the home computers of strangers.

You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about their mentality at http://www.defcon.org. The annual Def Con is the world's largest and raunchiest gathering of malicious hackers.

Because of their twisted motivations, their attacks can be more frightening than crimes motivated by money.

Fortunately these guys with giant psycho-sexual-cyber complexes aren't very talented. Running a personal firewall will stop most of these guys cold.

We will use the free Zone Alarm 2.1.44 to illustrate how to properly set up a personal firewall. You can find an up-to-date list of links to Zone Alarm and other personal firewall products and reviews here.