Archive for January, 2010
5 Easy Steps To Protect Your Small Business From Spyware
If your computers are in any way connected the Internet, they are being regularly bombarded with spyware, viruses, and other malware. Here are 5 easy steps you can follow to block these programs, or at least detect and remove spyware from your firm’s networks and computer systems.
What are these sneaky little programs up to?
The more benign spyware and adware simply watches the pages you visit on the web so that companies can fine-tune their marketing based on profiling. However, malicious spyware goes beyond tracking, monitoring keystrokes, capturing passwords and other functions which pose a definite security risk to your business.
Be Careful Where You Download
Unscrupulous programs often come from unscrupulous sites. If you are looking for a freeware or shareware program for a specific purpose, try searching reputable sites like tucows.com or download.com.
Actually Read the EULA
That’s an End User License Agreement. It’s all of the legal mumbo-jumbo in that box above the radio buttons that say “No, I do not accept” or “Yes, I accept these terms”. Most people click “yes” so fast you’d think they were playing a computer game. Keep in mind that the EULA is a legal agreement you are making with the software vendor–and you may be agreeing to install spyware or allow a variety of other changes to your system. Evaluate whether it’s worth it first.
Read that Pop-Up Window
Windows that pop up on websites are sometimes useful. But sometimes clicking the button or link will start to install harmful software. Like the EULA, many users will click “yes” or “ok” without stopping to read the text just to make it go away. Maybe it said “Would you like to install our spyware program?” Ok, admittedly they don’t come out and say it directly, but that is all the more reason to pause and actually read those messages before you accept.
Fight Back with Antivirus Software
Viruses are just a small part of the what you need software to protect you from. Antivirus software has expanded to include fighting worms, trojans, vulnerability exploits, jokes, hoaxes and even spyware and adware. Check that your business’s antivirus system will detect and block spyware. You can try a product like AdAware Pro, which will protect your system from spyware or adware in real time.
Scan Your Networks
Even with antivirus software, firewalls and other protective measures some spyware or adware may eventually make it through the network to individual computers. While a product like AdAware Pro mentioned previously will monitor your systems in real time, your business must pay licensing fees in order to install AdAware Pro system-wide. Evaluating and using the strongest solution is worth it when you consider the IT expense of fixing systems and the time lost by employees, not to mention the frustration. However, AdAware is the free alternative for personal use provided by Lavasoft, the makers of AdAware Pro. AdAware will not monitor in real time, but you can scan your system manually to detect and remove spyware. Another excellent choice is Spybot Search & Destroy, also free.
Follow these five steps and you’ll proactively protect your computers from spyware and detect and remove any harmful code that does infiltrate. Take care of it today!
Best Dedicated Servers
If you have been looking for web hosting on the internet, you have probably observed the abundance of ads for dedicated servers. If you are a novice when it comes to computers and website hosting, you may not understand what a dedicated server is.
A dedicated server hosts only your website. You are, in essence, hosting your own website. You have total control of the bandwidth, space and security of the server. In most cases, the provider will give you the equipment that you need as long as long as you continue to use their service.
You can usually get a better deal with a dedicated server if you pay annually for the service instead of monthly. Most service providers ask for a monthly fee. Monthly fees for a dedicated server usually run a couple of hundred dollars. If you pay annually, you may be able to save a bit of money.
There is a risk of paying annually, however. If the provider goes out of business and the equipment becomes obsolete, you may be out of luck. If you become unhappy with your service provider and their customer service, or the actual server, you may find yourself stuck with them for a year.
To get the best dedicated server, you need to shop around. Make sure that you find a service provider that will give you quality service. If your server goes down, it will be imperative that you can contact someone for help immediately. The longer your service remains down, the more money you lose.
A budget dedicated server provider may offer such attractive incentives such as no start up costs. In order to get your website going, you will have to upload it onto the server. Most server providers will charge a fee for this. The fee to get your server going and your website up and running may be substantial. This sometimes puts some people off, but it is a one time fee. Once your business is up and running, you only need to only pay the monthly fee to the service provider.
Although it may be seem prudent to reduce costs as much as possible when starting up your website on a dedicated server, this is one area where you do not want to sacrifice service for cost. The best dedicated servers are reliable, offer excellent customer service and have large bandwidth and space. While you may find some budget servers that offer a low monthly rate, take a look at the bandwidth and space that they are offering. In some cases, it may not even be as much as what you can get on a shared server.
To find the best quality dedicated servers, shop around on the internet. It may also help to talk to other website owners that you know to find out if they can recommend a provider. Remember that good customer service is as crucial to the maintenance of your business as is the expanded bandwidth and space afforded by a dedicated server.
A Safer Way to Recover Damaged Partitions
Repairing damaged partitions on is a risky business. Even if you use the best toolkit and are absolutely sure in what you are doing, you are still risking your files shall something go wrong. Changes made to the damaged partition are irreversible; it is just too easy to overwrite an important system structure that holds vital information about your disk, files and data. Bottom line: it’s good to backup before performing data recovery. But is this really the best way to do it?
There is a different approach to do data recovery that is even safer. No need to backup and restore during the recovery. Instead of making a backup copy of corrupted data, you can simply take a binary snapshot of the partition being repaired, and attempt the recovery with different settings as many times as you need on this snapshot instead of the actual disk.
SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor by http://softambulance.com/ is one of a few data recovery tools that allow recovering a virtual image of a damaged hard drive instead of repairing the hard drive directly. The data recovery tool lets you create a binary image of the damaged hard drive, and works with the binary image instead of the real thing. The binary image is a big file stored on another hard disk, CD, DVD or other media. The technology is similar to making an .iso image of a CD or DVD disc, only SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor extends it to partitions or even entire disks.
The hard drive copy may be virtual, but any data you save from it is for real. SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor can recover your files, documents and other data from the binary image and put it on a healthy media. After that, you can attempt fixing the damaged system structures of the corrupted hard drivewithout taking any risk at all. Any modifications will be performed on the virtual image.
Don’t rush the recovery. Don’t take the risk of losing or corrupting your data. Create a virtual snapshot of the hard drive being repaired, and work on that snapshot instead of accessing the corrupted hard drive. This procedure keeps your original data safe, and ensures the highest level of safety during the recovery process.
SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor recovers files from damaged and corrupted disks and partitions and fixes damaged hard drives. The disk recovery product supports all 32-bit versions of Windows, and recovers FAT and NTFS formatted hard disks, memory cards, CD and DVD media, and USB flash drives. The evaluation version is available for free at http://softambulance.com/