Staying one step ahead of the hackers

Times have really changed. Remember in the late eighties and early nineties, before the home computer boom really hit, back when computers were more of a nerd’s hobby than an important part of your everyday life?

Back then, the idea of “cyber crime” was a sort of a romantic notion! Like pirates, but with computers instead of ships. “Hackers” were pure sci-fi as far as most of us were concerned, an elite group of whiz kids who zipped around town on roller blades, using floppy diskettes to crack into CIA networks and pull grand scale practical jokes on the whole of the internet. There was an allure to hackers because, well, we didn’t know what hackers really were at the time, we just thought that computers were kind of nerdy, but if you add an outlaw appeal to them, you have something really cool!

As with many futuristic flights of whimsy, the reality didn’t live up to the speculation. We all thought we’d have flying cars by now, or at the very least, personal jetpacks, but here we are driving around in our boring ol’ Toyota Camry and minivans. What’s worse, hackers aren’t a cool, rebellious youth culture like they were in the movies. They’re just a bunch of crooks trying to steal your credit card. What a gyp!

Of course, if those cyberpunk movies from the days of AOL dialup held any water, we wouldn’t have to worry about hackers at all. The hackers would be targeting “The Man”, when in reality, the hackers target normal people and businesses in an attempt to scam a few quick bucks off of hard working people.

So we’ve established two things so far: Hackers aren’t as cool as we thought they’d be twenty years ago, and you have to protect yourself from them.

So, how do we stay one step ahead of the hackers?

First of all, make sure you have some good antivirus software. The more potent the better, but even some of the free programs will do the trick (more or less) if you just need something to hold you over for now and don’t have time to shop around just yet.

However, the hackers are working day and night to figure out how to get around your security software, and the security software makers are, likewise, working day and night to figure out new ways to patch the holes in the system. It’s similar to the evolution of medicine and biological viruses and germs. As we come up with more and more potent ways to eliminate disease, disease evolves to work around our defensive measures. It’s an endless cycle of one upmanship.

We’ll give you a few tips here to patch the holes you software leaves behind, but understand that some of this intel might be obsolete within a few years, as, again, hackers are working every day to get around these measures. The most important thing is to keep informed. You don’t have to subscribe to WIRED Magazine or anything, but the next time you pick up a newspaper and there’s an article in there about how the Spam Kings are stealing everyone’s email addresses, go ahead and give it a read…

1. Wi-fi hotspots are the greatest thing to hit the internet since 56k dial-up, but they’re also a hacker’s paradise, as you are literally sending information right out into thin air for anyone with the equipment and know how to snatch right up. Protect your wireless internet device or laptop by going into your security settings and switching to the WPA protocol. Hacking researchers have reported that WPA has almost no weak points whatsoever.
2. Keep your antivirus software up to date. There are a dozen new viruses being created per minute, so many antivirus programs will actually provide multiple automatic updates in a single day, as more and more viruses are added to the database.
3. Don’t forget, laptop security isn’t restricted to just preventing hackers from breaking in. Let’s say you’re at a coffee shop and a nearby hacker finds he cannot break into your laptop no matter how hard he tries. So… he waits til you get up to order a refill, and he takes a quick peek at your screen while your back is turned! You don’t have to be paranoid but, when in public, just make sure your laptop is always in your sight.

In the end, it simply takes common sense and a little bit of self education to stay ahead of the hackers. And… it might also be a good idea to keep some professionals in mind if you need to set up a network or enlist computer forensic services.