DIY Online Security - Welcome!

This website is aimed at the home computer user or a small / medium business user who is not a computer or security expert. The goal of the website is to provide clear, simple instructions on how to dramatically reduce the risk of becoming a victim and suffering (data and or financial) losses as a result of on-line fraud, identity theft, malware, spyware, viruses, trojans, spam, phishing attacks, data loss, computer hardware failure, etc.

To protect yourself on-line you need to do the following:

Ensure you have a secure computer system, including latest patches, firewalls, anti-virus, trojan / spyware detection and removal software. If necessary, you may have to sanitize your computer first.
Follow good security practices, including strategies for safe on-line banking, on-line shopping, protect your identity, protect your privacy, keeping your data confidential, reduce the amount of spam you get, protect your children, etc.
Regularly maintain your computer system, including patches, virus signatures, tests to check your security is still working
Back up your data

By improving your security you are also reducing the risk of your computer system being used by malicious hackers to attack other users on the Internet, and in particular you will be reducing the likelihood of your system being used to distribute spam and phishing attacks to other innocent users.

How much cost and effort is it to secure my system?

Costs vary but as a general rule home users (home personal use only) can achieve good security for less than about £55 GBP (less than about $100USD) since a lot of the software licences are free for personal home use (but check the licence carefully before use to make sure it is free). Small business users will have to pay more since there are few security products which are free for business use.

The amount of effort varies a lot from system to system, but we have found for a home user and small office user the following guides are reasonably accurate:

To read the contents of this site and to set up the basic security on system can take up to a few hours, depending on your situation. However, that time spent will pay for itself many times over in the future when there is a virus / malware / phishing outbreak on the Internet. After you have a good, solid, baseline system, there are some daily tasks - like backing up your data - which should only take a few minutes and then there are tasks such as maintaining your system for example keeping up to date and applying new patches which averages to about 1 hour a month spread over the month. But you need to apply your patches in a timely manner and not wait to the end of the month. (Note: for Microsoft Windows users Microsoft generally publishes patches on the first Tuesday of the month so shortly after that, depending on your timezone, you will need to update your system.)

This site is still developing and we intend to add content periodically. So please visit us regularly. This main page will show abstracts of the latest content added with links to those pages shown below.

How to navigate this site

Most of this site is written in a way fairly independent of operating system and the suggestions should apply equally well to a single computer or several networked together running Microsoft Windows XP, Mac OS or Linux. There are be some specific pages for the most popular operating systems, e.g. Windows, and Mac OS.

Note: If you are using older operating systems such as; Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT4, Mac OS 9 and earlier, then please read these notes about the security of these systems. In general the manufacturers are withdrawing support for these operating systems and will not be providing security updates – see their website for exact details. Thus from a security point of view it is very bad to use an operating system which is not supported by the manufacturer.

This site is divided into several chapters as shown in the navigation bar along the top of the page. Once you have selected a chapter a menu will appear on the left handside for that chapter. You can read each chapter like a book by following the "next page" links at the bottom of every page. This is probably the quickest way to get a flavour of all the issues we cover. We intend to cover only the main issues initially and plan to keep it fresh and current.

What now? - Simple Action Plan

Read the information on this site and some of the external references we provide.
Decide the level of security you want to achieve - the more security you want the more effort and possibly costs you will have to deploy. But as a minimum you should completely follow the instructions in the Chapter "Basic Computer Security" section titled "Minimum Security".
Make a note to revisit this site and check your system security on a monthly basis. (This assumes you will enable - the automatic features described in "Minimum Security").
Remember maintaining good security is a journey, not a destination. You must be vigilant all the time and think about your actions on line.
After the initial effort of setting up your system, the amount of work involved in maintaining good security is relatively small and pain free.

Caution

Note: before making any configuration changes (or you install any software) PLEASE please please back up any data, documents, files, etc that would cause you grief if you lost them. On all computer systems there is always a small risk of loss of data, files, etc when you add / remove programs, change configurations, etc.

You use the information provided on this site at your own risk. However, what we suggest should be fairly safe on most standard configurations of systems. You should remember to back up regularly anyway!! If you are unsure of anything please get professional help. This site is intended as a primer to reduce the risk you falling victim to an attack. However the risk can never be completely eliminated. Security is such a broad subject it is impossible to cover all aspects of it in such a primer. By learning about security and implementing the measures suggested on this site you can dramatically reduce the risk of your computer and or your sensitive data being compromised.

Please read the full terms of use of this site here .

Next Page - Why Protect Ourselves

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