Protect Yourself
By: Mister Megabyte

    Chances are good that you or someone you know will be a victim of internet
hacking and perhaps not even know it. If your a cable or DSL customer then
your chances are increased exponentially due to the 24/7 connection.

The good news is there is something you can do to protect yourself.

Firewalls
Like a police wears a bulletproof vest, you too can equip the electronic equivalent.
Firewalls will keep the badguys out of your machine. Without a firewall you
are sort of like a person who has a house without a roof, without a roof there is 
nothing to keep the rain out. 

Fortunately there are many great products out there to help you.

First off- Forget Black Ice Defender.

Grab these 3 things for a happy internet life:

s Jammer from Agnitum.
s Either Conseal Firewall or LookNStop
s Cleaner from Moosoft.

Run and use these programs and you will have MANY less headaches.

The Rundown
Jammer is a great watchdog program, it will monitor your PC for signs of
Trojan like activity, changes to your registry and also blocks malicious
traffic.

Since Jammer isn't focused on being a "door man" you will also need a good
Firewall.

With Jammer you are likely to notice an "attack" called Port Scanning going
on constantly and you will instantly be glad you are now aware of this
activity.  Port Scanning is the equivalent of someone going up to your house
and car doors and jiggling the knob to see if anything is unlocked.

When they Port Scan they are looking for open ports in which to crawl into.
DON'T PANIC you will see Port Scanning ALOT and it is generally nothing
to be too highly concerned with.

Conseal Firewall is a pretty good product. It actively monitors everything.
McCafee bought a license to include this technology in their "personal firewall"
products.

The advantage of LookNStop is it is completely FREE for personal use.

A Word Of Warning
A poorly/non-configured firewall is as bas as NO firewall. Make sure you
read all the configuration documentation. I'm not going to lie to you, setting
up a firewall can be time consuming and require a lot of reading.

If you search around you can find pre-configured rules which you can 
generally download and import into your program.

Beware though because if they didn't know what they were doing when 
they created their rules then your PC will be just as insecure!

Firewall.net is a great place to download rulesets and read further into
firewalls.

Trojans
There may be a chance you are already infected and don't even know it.
The only way to find out is to scan your system.

Wait a second, won't the anti-virus program  already on my PC work?

NO.

Most anti-virus programs are completely ineffective when it comes to Trojans.

For example:  Innoculate-IT (Computer Associates) virus scanner does not
scan inside compressed files (zip, cab, rar, upx etc)  and neither does MANY
by default.

The Cleaner also includes more active monitoring power to keep anything
from going unnoticed. Making it an effective Trojan remover and police-force.

In Conclusion
If you follow this advise and obtain these programs and use them every day,
you are certain to avoid the misfortune of a messy cleanup after a hacker
runs rampant on your harddrive.