Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

Where do our computers catch those horrible diseases, those bugs and worms and and infections?

Not by sitting quietly by themselves while you play locally based solitaire or Tetris. Not by running Word as you continue to write the Great American Novel, page after laborious page. It’s a suspense novel, right? And the suspense is about whether you will ever manage to finish it. You know very well that I am working on the GAN too, along with who knows how many thousands of others. Why don’t we make it a collaborative effort, and stir our plots together, and produce a behemoth, a megillah, maybe a trilogy or quintilogy or whatever?

But I digress (which could be why I will not finish the GAN anytime soon). The point is that it is by what we do online that our computers become vulnerable to malware and that we might fall prey to rackets that send us scurrying to a Western Union agency or wherever we can send money from, to ransom our hapless systems, or to TWIG systems for some bench time.

I could advise you to disconnect from the Internet, and give up email too. But you are not about to do that! I have heard from so many people, so many times, that their computers aren’t working, when the fact of the matter is that their Internet is down and the computer is just fine. A computer or a gadget (phone, tablet) that isn’t linked to the outside world by some service or other is like a mosquito or a tick with no mouth parts. How can it feed, and how can it receive or transmit illnesses?

You may be thinking I am about to advise you to obtain and install and faithfully use heavy duty anti-malware/anti-adware/anti-phishing software. Yeah, the premium or professional versions of those programs are beastly expensive, but at least you would not have to be at the mercy of those ravening, slavering attackers that we imagine to be surrounding us, or lurking just behind the monitor waiting for a chance to pop into view with menacing warnings, or maybe with friendly-seeming offers of much needed services or really fun games which we would accept to our sorrow.

Actually, the charges for the main anti-malware and pop-up blockers aren’t so bad anymore. But how about the resources they hog, on your machine? They’ll slow it way down because of all the bloat that’s coded into them.

Actually again, the protective proggies aren’t the overgrown monsters they used to be.

What I am recommending is using a good browser, and the free version of some solid anti-virus program (I like Avast; Panda and AVG and Trend are others I have used and recommended), on a good operating system (Windows 7 and 8 come to mind). And I am urging sensible caution and good surfing habits.

And don’t try to get free movies and music from pirate sites! Do you trust the hygiene of pirates? Arrgh!

Recent versions of Windows have built-in firewalls, and either Security Essentials or Defender. Bone up on those if necessary, and use them at fairly “high” settings. Also folded into Windows is SmartScreen.

If you use Internet Explorer, be aware that it has strong defenses against hijacking. In fact, there’s plenty of security built into other popular browsers, such as Firefox and Chrome. Firefox has been my main browser for years.

I get warnings about suspicious or suspect sites I might be trying to visit, and I usually set the safeguards so I can’t override them easily or accidentally. Clinically blind people have been known to blunder into traffic or push the wrong button.

It seems as if most of us have routers now, and those come with their own firewalls.

Those who browse and surf more than they do anything else with computers also use search engines a lot. Google and Bing and Yahoo are sent to look for this and that on our behalf, and obediently present lists of sites for us to click on (along with ads).

That’s where we might want to use Web of Trust, to check out those search results. There’s a WOT version for any browser you are likely to use. It will steer you away from scams and dodgy links, and it provides rating of sites. And it’s free.

We used to think that we were safe even at a site where there is something phishy or fishy, so long as we didn’t click on it. But now there are sites that can and will install malware, or enslave our systems, if we simply splash down there.

A time not to click is if we are looking at an email with an unsafe link. Phishing emails contain links that can take us to infectious sites. And emails that are laden with HTML stuff, photos, logos and decorative effects might do you mischief simply by being previewed. So my practice is to keep my email programs set to just list my emails without previewing them. I can right-click to get some info before opening them, and those I open they will be presented without the fancy stuff until I click permission for that.

Even with precautions about what sites to visit, there is the possibility of clicking something on a page that is not part of the site itself. Just running the mouse pointer over a link will display the URL, as a pop-up message or in the bottom alert or scroll area. Usually those will reveal whether the site where the link would take us is what it claims to be. If we are still not sure, using WOT would settle the matter.

Often, the bigger the button, the greater the likelihood there is trickery involved.

Just to make sure you don’t have a lot of crud on your system now, you can run the free version of MalwareBytes.