I don?t do anything special!Ok, so you think you have nothing to loose even if someone hacks you and breaks into your PC. First of all let me clarify, the hacks or break-ins nowadays are mostly (around 80%) money driven. This means that the person who breaks into your PC (with a trojan or a virus or whatever other means) most likely will want to make a profit by doing so. There are several ways of doing this and here are a few listed. In the end of the article you will find a nice list of what to do to prevent being broken into.
Zombie host!The most use your computer most likely poses to any person that tries to get into your machine is to convert it into a zombie host. That means that the attacker will install a program on your PC without you know it that will allow him to do one or severely things: Send spam mail from your machine or attack other PC’s or websites from your machine. The easy way to find out if something is wrong is if your internet all of a sudden gets REALLY slow, no matter what you do and/or our computer overall is really sluggish and slow.
Personal Information theft!The other option why someone would want to hack your machine is in order to steal information you already have on your machine OR to install a keylogger in order to steal your passwords and other information.
A keylogger logs every keystroke you make to a file, which is sent via email to somewhere or to a chat channel.
What that means is that even if you think you do everything encrypted online, on your banking for example, the keylogger will get your username and password anyway, as well as usernames and passwords to anywhere else as soon as you type them. So even if you THINK you have nothing personal on you PC your personal things can leak out.
If you actually HAVE personal data stored on your PC, say you use a banking software or Software like Quicken or have a lot of Documents on your machine, then you are even more at risk because f someone DOES break into your PC, then they have full control to your documents and trust me these people are smart, they KNOW what they are looking for.
This is terrible!! What to do?? Well, everyone will tell you that “keep your anti virus up to date and install a firewall. This is true but you should also be a bit more aware of WHERE and WHAT you surf. Also with WHAT is a problem. Internet explorer has a track record worse then a criminal on death row with its security flaws. Consider using an Alternative Browser, like Firefox, Mozilla, or Opera. Also, start having a LITTLE paranoia. Most firewalls (like Zonelarm or Symantec Internet Security) pop up if a program wants to access the internet. So please next time NOTEPAD.EXE wants to access the internet, DONT LET IT.. its a text editor and has no reason to. Also you might want to call your Tech guy in the family and ask him why Notepad tries to access the internet.
Also another important point is Spyware installations. You go to a website because they have these new “cute” smileys that you can download for free. All of a sudden you get a popup that says ?install Gator to download this?. You say OK and BAM you have one of the worst spyware on your machine, just for a bunch of smileys that only you can see anyway? People need to be more “aware” online. The internet is not all peaches and Pie. Its profit driven and there are people that have no ethics and scruples at all.

There are many more reasons and probably I could go into more details but these are written so taht even someone that does not care much about Computers and PC’s can understand them.

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