Got something to say or just want fewer pesky ads? Join us... 😊

Register Log in

Computer Protection advice sought.









Westdene Seagull

Westdene Seagull

aka Cap'n Carl Firecrotch
NSC Patron
Oct 27, 2003
21,005
The arse end of Hangleton
Another vote for Avast ..... make sure you uninstall McAfee before installing though.
 


thedonkeycentrehalf

thedonkeycentrehalf

Retired
Jul 7, 2003
8,613
ofco8 said:
I have both McAfee and Malwarebytes installed on my laptop. I particularly like Malwarebytes as it has sorted out lots of possible threats.

However, do they both do basically the same thing? McAfee tell me my subscription is running out and I need to pay £60 to renew for a year or £110 for two years.

How do you protect your equipment and what would you advise.
Click to expand...

First rule - if you use one of the main packages, never do the autorenewal as it is always expensive. At any time, one of the main paid for AV packages will be on sale for half price on Amazon or in Currys/PC World.

I am currently using Bitdefender which works well and cost around £22 for a multi-device licence.

As others have said, you can use free software and they work okay at a basic level - especially if you are PC savvy. For people not confident in their IT skills I would always recommend buying a decent package (but not at full price) as it not only gives you AV but SPAM protection, firewalls and many of them now have online payment protection which can be helpful.
 






Tricky Dicky

Tricky Dicky

New member
Jul 27, 2004
13,558
Sunny Shoreham
ofco8 said:
I have both McAfee and Malwarebytes installed on my laptop. I particularly like Malwarebytes as it has sorted out lots of possible threats.

However, do they both do basically the same thing? McAfee tell me my subscription is running out and I need to pay £60 to renew for a year or £110 for two years.

How do you protect your equipment and what would you advise.
Click to expand...

Funnily enough, I have exactly the same thing, I have malwarebytes - which is very good, plus I have Norton, and Norton are saying it's £75 to renew. I think malwarebytes does everything I need.
 


Audax

Audax

Boing boing boing...
Aug 3, 2015
2,931
Uckfield
bhanutz said:
Get a Mac?
Click to expand...

Did I seriously just read this? That Mac's are automatically "safe" from viruses is a complete and utter myth. Always has been. Our IT security team where I work actually ran us through some numbers recently, and Macs are now *more* prone to virus attack than PCs. For this very reason: there's too many people out there trusting to dumb luck because they believe the myth that Macs don't get viruses.


Oxy McFloppie-Tish said:
No, you need a combination of the two, but I wouldn't pay for AV. I use Avira, but AVG, Avast or others are fine. I run a regular Malwarebytes scan, and for all downloaded files.

The biggest dangers are ignorance and dodgy surfing.

Keep yourself safe with a free online course - https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/cyber-security or https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/introduction-to-cyber-security
Click to expand...

thedonkeycentrehalf said:
First rule - if you use one of the main packages, never do the autorenewal as it is always expensive. At any time, one of the main paid for AV packages will be on sale for half price on Amazon or in Currys/PC World.

I am currently using Bitdefender which works well and cost around £22 for a multi-device licence.

As others have said, you can use free software and they work okay at a basic level - especially if you are PC savvy. For people not confident in their IT skills I would always recommend buying a decent package (but not at full price) as it not only gives you AV but SPAM protection, firewalls and many of them now have online payment protection which can be helpful.
Click to expand...

This is good advice, regardless of whether you're on PC or Mac. The #1 best way to protect yourself is to educate yourself. So many IT attacks these days are actually reliant on the targeted user doing something they shouldn't (like opening an Excel file and absent mindedly clicking the "Enable Content" button without stopping to think first). Back up personal education with making sure you have decent automated protection (you don't have to pay for it! Avast, AVG, Malwarebytes will all do the job).

Last but not least: find a method of creating strong passwords that you can easily remember that works for you. DO NOT follow the old advice of using four random words strung together - this is now easy to brute force. The current best practice is to think of a sentence memorable for you, and then convert that sentence into a password by making alterations. The longer the better. As an example, if your sentence was "Why did the chicken cross the road?" your password might end up being "Yd1dCH0okXrd?" Only you know how you did the conversion, but the sentence is far more easily remembered than the string of letters, numbers etc is. Also make sure you have a unique password for every login you use - which is where cleverly chosen sentences make remembering the password so much easier.
 


The Andy Naylor Fan Club

The Andy Naylor Fan Club

Well-known member
Aug 31, 2012
5,147
Right Here, Right Now
ofco8 said:
How do you protect your equipment.
Click to expand...

2016-08-11-09-12-22-1634810862.jpeg

ofco8 said:
and what would you advise.
Click to expand...

1,width=300,height=300,appearanceId=1,version=1440399755.jpg
 




Westdene Seagull

Westdene Seagull

aka Cap'n Carl Firecrotch
NSC Patron
Oct 27, 2003
21,005
The arse end of Hangleton
Audax said:
Last but not least: find a method of creating strong passwords that you can easily remember that works for you. DO NOT follow the old advice of using four random words strung together - this is now easy to brute force. The current best practice is to think of a sentence memorable for you, and then convert that sentence into a password by making alterations. The longer the better. As an example, if your sentence was "Why did the chicken cross the road?" your password might end up being "Yd1dCH0okXrd?" Only you know how you did the conversion, but the sentence is far more easily remembered than the string of letters, numbers etc is. Also make sure you have a unique password for every login you use - which is where cleverly chosen sentences make remembering the password so much easier.
Click to expand...

Another method is to take a famous film quote and convert it to a password - so for example ( and it's a crap one because it's too short ! ) - "Slippery suckers aren't they ?" from Pretty Woman becomes 'ssat?' but you get the idea !
 


vegster

vegster

Sanity Clause
May 5, 2008
27,892
Tom Hark said:
Another vote for Avast here. Totally free and seems to do the business.

Beware of McAfee. An old lady neighbour of mine came to me stressed out that she wanted to cancel her McAfee subscription but the phone line was rubbish and went unanswered. Did a bit of googling and turns out that McAfee have a default setting of 'Auto-Renew', because they claim that that's what most of their customers want. Yeah, right. So unless you go into your McAfee account and untick the 'Auto-Renew' option, they'll just keep on taking your money, whether you require their services any longer or not. Nice little money spinner for McAfee.
Click to expand...

The one time I ever had anything nasty in my computer it was " protected " by a McAfee anti virus at the time....been with Avast for many years with no problems now.
 


Dick Swiveller

Dick Swiveller

Well-known member
Sep 9, 2011
9,156
Computer protection is not a new thing. Make sure you practice 'safe computing' with your Commodore 64! Always 'rubber up'.

s-l225.jpg
 




F

Fungus

Well-known member
NSC Patron
May 21, 2004
7,046
Truro
Audax said:
Did I seriously just read this? That Mac's are automatically "safe" from viruses is a complete and utter myth. Always has been. Our IT security team where I work actually ran us through some numbers recently, and Macs are now *more* prone to virus attack than PCs. For this very reason: there's too many people out there trusting to dumb luck because they believe the myth that Macs don't get viruses.

This is good advice, regardless of whether you're on PC or Mac. The #1 best way to protect yourself is to educate yourself. So many IT attacks these days are actually reliant on the targeted user doing something they shouldn't (like opening an Excel file and absent mindedly clicking the "Enable Content" button without stopping to think first). Back up personal education with making sure you have decent automated protection (you don't have to pay for it! Avast, AVG, Malwarebytes will all do the job).

Last but not least: find a method of creating strong passwords that you can easily remember that works for you. DO NOT follow the old advice of using four random words strung together - this is now easy to brute force. The current best practice is to think of a sentence memorable for you, and then convert that sentence into a password by making alterations. The longer the better. As an example, if your sentence was "Why did the chicken cross the road?" your password might end up being "Yd1dCH0okXrd?" Only you know how you did the conversion, but the sentence is far more easily remembered than the string of letters, numbers etc is. Also make sure you have a unique password for every login you use - which is where cleverly chosen sentences make remembering the password so much easier.
Click to expand...

As someone said: "Hackers don't hack computers, they hack people".

As regards passwords, I have far too many to remember, and it's bad practice to re-use them more than once. I use a password manager to create random passwords, and a very long password to access it!
 


happypig

happypig

Staring at the rude boys
May 23, 2009
7,960
Eastbourne
Oxy McFloppie-Tish said:
As someone said: "Hackers don't hack computers, they hack people".
Click to expand...

Indeed. That's why Macs are less vulnerable, because there are 10x as many windows machines so 10x as likely to have a vulnerable user.

[
As regards passwords, I have far too many to remember, and it's bad practice to re-use them more than once. I use a password manager to create random passwords, and a very long password to access it!
Click to expand...

I use PWsafe, because the dat file can be opened in OSX, iOS or Linux (probably windows too but I've never checked).

If you want to browse some of those "fruity pictures' sites, consider running a VM.
 








S

Shropshire Seagull

Well-known member
Nov 5, 2004
8,496
Telford
I bought a 5 year old HP Base station PC off ebay - runs Win XP modest CPU & RAM and a small 80GB HDD - all it has installed on it is Chrome and AVG - it's my "surf-box" and I paid £50 for it.

I then use an Omini-box which enables me to share Keyboard, Mouse and Monitor and to switch from one PC to the other as in: my surf-only PC to my main PC with all my stuff on it that I'd not want corrupted or hacked.

Should my surf-box get hit by a virus: a) there is nothing on it of any value / significance what so ever that could be "stolen" - just my dodgy browsing history. b) I can blat the hard drive and re-image to basics in about half an hour confident that I have nothing on it that I would miss if lost for ever.

Just means I can surf with confidence and not think - should I not click on that? Every five minutes.
 


Audax

Audax

Boing boing boing...
Aug 3, 2015
2,931
Uckfield
Oxy McFloppie-Tish said:
As someone said: "Hackers don't hack computers, they hack people".

As regards passwords, I have far too many to remember, and it's bad practice to re-use them more than once. I use a password manager to create random passwords, and a very long password to access it!
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, our security folks also told us that there is not one password manager out there that hasn't been compromised in some fashion. The risk you take is that the manager becomes a single point of failure and if someone somehow gets access to it, you've lost everything.


Sidcup Seagull said:
Good advice, but how on earth do you remember that alteration?
Click to expand...

The original sentence provides the memory jog. So when I go to access my Farming Simulator 2016 account (I don't have one), I know that the password is based on the old chicken joke, and from there it's relatively simple to remember how I turned it into a password. The method I used was quite simple:

Why = Y
did = d1d
the = ignored
chicken = CH0ok
cross = X
the = ignored again
road = rd
? = ?

The most complex alteration is changing chicken to chook (I'm an Aussie, it's common slang downunder)


And yes, as mentioned by someone else - using a famous movie quote is a good way. Just make sure that the conversion into a password isn't obvious. Password crackers these days can be fed "standard approaches" to try to crack passwords. So, for example, the original advice on using a sentence was using famous movie quotes. But there's only so many movie quotes, and the original advice was to take the first letter from each word, and maybe do some number/symbol replacement (1 for i, @ for a, 7 for T for example). That type of password conversion can be cracked pretty easily, especially if the cracker has already done some social background checks on you (eg you have your favourite movie listed on your Facebook profile).

It's ok to use a method to do the conversion from sentence to password, but it needs to be your own method, and it's best to have some change-ups within the password. In my example, I've done some straight substitution (d1d), short-form replacement of two varieties (Y, X, rd), some omission (the x2), and in the middle a word replacement with added substitution (CH0ok). I could also have made it even more complex (for a cracker, but not for myself) by adding an intuitive prefix or suffix (eg a number string that makes sense in the context of the account I'm creating the password for.)
 


F

Fungus

Well-known member
NSC Patron
May 21, 2004
7,046
Truro
Audax said:
Unfortunately, our security folks also told us that there is not one password manager out there that hasn't been compromised in some fashion. The risk you take is that the manager becomes a single point of failure and if someone somehow gets access to it, you've lost everything.
Click to expand...

Absolutely true. However there is no such thing as "absolutely safe". Everything you do online is a compromise between safety and convenience.

But I must have over 50 passwords, and there's no way I could remember them all (plus usernames). I would suggest it's a bigger risk to re-use them across different websites / apps.
 




glasfryn

glasfryn

cleaning up cat sick
Nov 29, 2005
20,261
somewhere in Eastbourne
just insalled PANDA
d/t has speeded-up and so far no problems = about £37 for life
its got rid all my unwanted files ans some malware
windows protection is pretty useless
PC world is a lot more expensive
 


Audax

Audax

Boing boing boing...
Aug 3, 2015
2,931
Uckfield
Oxy McFloppie-Tish said:
Absolutely true. However there is no such thing as "absolutely safe". Everything you do online is a compromise between safety and convenience.

But I must have over 50 passwords, and there's no way I could remember them all (plus usernames). I would suggest it's a bigger risk to re-use them across different websites / apps.
Click to expand...

Indeed, absolutely. I have to admit that I make the decision on some accounts to use a common password. Basically, does the account the password is protecting hold enough detail about me that I'd be concerned if it was broken into? Or, does the account provide access to something I'd be mighty pissed if I lost? Answer being Yes to either of those, it gets a unique password. Answer being No to both, it gets my common password.
 


You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Albion and Premier League latest from Sky Sports


Top
Link Here