Protect yourself from Viruses and Ransomware

[Roger]

Prevention:

• Never, not ever open an email attachment you are not certain about.
• Check attachments before opening

1. Forward the email message with the attachment intact to scan@virustotal.com (limit is 10 MB)
2. Delete the full body of the message text
3. Write SCAN in the Subject field of the forwarded message
4. Send the email.
   VT will scan the attachment with more than 50 virus/malware scanners and email you back with a virus report within a few minutes.

Protection:

• Install a good Anti-virus, one that scans your email also, if you use an email client such as outlook or Thunderbird. Only install one A/V, as a second will slow your system down and neither will work properly
• Install Ransomware protection software: CryptoPrevent and MalwareBytes Anti-Ransomware - both are free and will work together
• Consider installing MBAM, the paid version is particularly effective and will block rogue websites (some a/v do also)

Change your Browsing habits

• Check urls before you click on them using browser extensions:

1. WebOfTrust
2. VirusTotal

Note on Antiviruses

• Not all A/Vs are created equal - do your research
• Free ones are of minimal value, invest in a good one
• Good ones include:
  • Kaspersky
  • ESET
  • Bitdefender
  • AVG
  • Avira

Be cautious of reviews. Reviewers rely on advertising for revenue and they can gloss over issues. For example, both Norton and McAfee are very effective - but will slow your system down to a crawl.

A perfect PC setup would be

Anti-Virus - Kaspersky or ESET
Anti-Malware - MalwareBytes premium
Ransomware Protection: CryptoPrevent and MalwareBytes Anti-Ransomeware
Browser Addons- Virus Total and Web of Trust
Firewall: With Windows 7 or 10, the inbuilt FireWall is perfectly adequate - especially if you are behind a router. Unless you know what you're doing, I don't recomend a 3rd party Firewall as they can be complex to set up correctly (if they aren't - then they probably are not as good as Windows own Firewall). The only exception is ...
Glasswire: https://www.glasswire.com/ GlassWire's firewall reveals all your network activity so you can easily see what your computer is doing in the background. GlassWire's firewall shows you what current and past servers your computer is communicating with so you can see potential threats and block them if necessary.

Operating systems:
Do not use Windows XP if you can avoid it - it is highly vulnerable to exploit
Windows 10 is the best do to some inbuilt security features. otherwise use Windows 7

Browser:
FireFox or Chrome are the most secure and reliable, make sure they are updated

Vulnerable Programs - make sure you keep these updated if you use them

• Java
• Flash

 

[BaZa®]

Re: Protect yourself from Viruses and Ransomware

Thanks Roger, I've copied and pasted the post and placed it on a Word Doc in my PC all the links will be highlighted in the doc and can be used for future reference rather than looking for this post in the future.