Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Internet Protection

Right now I am working a lot on my senior project, which will be finished and presented next April. The project is essentially a parental control solution for those who want to limit their computer usage. Additionally I am fighting with spyware that has infiltrated my parents work computers. Their employees have been given unrestricted access to the systems, and that was a bad idea. Because of these two events in my life I have been thinking a lot about how to keep people safe from the internet.

There are a lot of solutions that can be applied to a system to help protect users from the muck that wants to hurt them and their computers. One that I just started to use is OpenDNS. OpenDNS provides filtered DNS servers that don't resolve common sites that contain pornography, spyware or are phishing sites. You also get detailed logs of internet activity. A secure way to implement this is to change the DNS settings in your router.

It is also important to have anti-spyware and anti-virus software installed and up to date. There are lots of free solutions including adaware and AVG. This helps keep your system clean.

Finally a big problem is letting the users have full administrative access. This is one thing that I am changing on the computers I support. Administrator accounts now have passwords and user accounts don't have admin rights. This helps prevent system settings from being changed and keeps unwanted software from being installed.

While this is not a comprehensive list, if these guidelines are followed you and your computer will be much more protected from the internet mucky muck.

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