Are you involved in any actions?
Are you involved in any high-risk actions?
Do you use your computer and the internet to do most of your organising?
I you answered "Yes" to any of these questions then you might want to consider the possibility that the authorities may be watching your every online move.
In this article I will discuss methods which you can use to deter the authorities and anyone else from trying to compromise your computer system.
The scope of this article is not to provide a full technical walkthrough, but to provide pointers in the right direction.
Software.
The first line of defence in a secure operating system, many people don't have an option as to which OS they use so I will be brief.
Microsoft Windows is an absolutely shite OS as far as security is concerned, it's full of bugs and security flaws and most malware is written for Microsoft OSs. But most of us use a windows varient, the main (read as only) focus of this article is securing a Windows OS but for more secure operating systems look at the various Linux distributions and BSD distributions (If you choose to use these you better know what you're doing).
The second line of defence is a firewall, there are many of these on the commercial market but there are a couple of decent freeware versions, I use ZoneLabs ZoneAlarm and, as far as I know, it does a decent job, it's easy to install, mostly configures itself and requires almost no maintainance. It's also free if you hadn't guessed.
ZoneLabs ZoneAlarm can be found here.
The next line of defence is a decent antivirus program, there are also many of these on the market, but I use Avast antivirus. Avast seems to do a good job of keeping my computers clean and updates itself automatically as soon as the updates are released, it's also easy to use and runs with very little interaction from the user, again it's also free.
Avast antivirus can be found here.
After a firewall and antivirus the next line of defence is a decent web browser and all I'm going to say is USE FIREFOX, it's millions of times better than Microsoft IE.
Firefox can be found here.
A decent E-mail client is also a bonus, I suggest using another product from mozilla called Thunderbird. It's better and easier to use than MS Outlook and with an extension supports Gnu Privacy Guard(GPG, which I'll mention later).
Thunderbird can be found here.
Of course a decent E-mail client isn't any good without a mail service that supports POP and SMTP, there are a plethora of services that offer this support two of them are Yahoo! mail and Gmail.
Yahoo! mail can be found here.
Gmail is here. However you'll need an invite to get a Gmail account (Kinda elitist eh?) if you want a Gmail invite just PM me with your current email address and I'll do my best to send you one, I have about 100.
Encryption is a must to ensure that your mail ONLY gets seen by it's intended recipients even if you don't need that level of security encryption is also useful to sign emails electronically to reassure the recipient that the email was sent by you.
for compatibilty with Thunderbird and ease of use I suggest you use GPG with the Enigmail Thunderbird extension.
GPG can be found here.
The Enigmail extension can be found here.
Finally on the software side of things I'll mention Spywareblaster and Spybot: Search and destroy, these two pieces of software will both help protect you by fixing known flaws in your browser(s) and the latter will also remove anything that Avast doesn't find (Which is apparently most spyware and adware as they aren't virii or worms.)
Spywareblaster can be found here.
Spybot: Search and Destroy can be found here.
Usernames and passwords.
Firstly a note on usernames, try not to use ones which contain anything which might point to you personally. Second, try not to use the same username for more than one account.
Next, Passwords, NEVER USE THE SAME PASSWORD FOR MORE THAN ONE ACCOUNT! Think about it, if someone finds the password for your revleft account it's not too much of a problem but if that password is the same for your email and/or your PC, it quickly becomes a big problem.
Never use a password containing only words from a language, try to mix a couple of numbers into the password, for example: "1r2e3v4l5e6f7t", see how easy it is? Of course the most secure option would to use a random password generator, but then you have the problem of memorising them.
More comprehensive guidelines for choosing a password can be found here.
Anyone who is interested in reading more about home computer security should visit Lockdown.
Well I think that's about it, I hope this article helps people, I spent long enough writing it so people better use it, or they will all be purged! :P
- Yours in fighting the government's 1337 h4x0r ninjas, RebelOutcast
