Free Internet Security Links

Hurrah! Originally uploaded by ftruijens.

For those of us who are not fortunate enough to use Apple products that are relatively free from viruses, the online world is a very scary place with viruses, trojans, spam, key loggers, spyware, and spam.

In order to help make the world a better place, Safety Neal and the Bellman are providing some links to free computer security programs, to help keep the malware away.

• Site Advisor is a new product that uses an artificial intelligence program to visit websites, fill in their forms, submits a unique email address, downloads their freeware products & then monitors the amount of spam, spyware, and malware that results.
  
  It’s not yet been publicly released, but you can use it as a tester if you want to be bleeding edge.
  
  I’ve been running it in Firefox for 2 weeks now and haven’t had a single problem.
  


• Panda Free Anti-Virus Scan allows you to scan your hard drive manually.
  


• Zone Labs Free Personal Firewall that allows you to decide if you want to allow programs to activate other processes as well as if you want to allow programs to access the Internet. In theory, even if you were infected with a worm, this program would keep the worm from reaching out to other computers. In practice, I find people often click through the warnings from their personal firewalls without reading them...human error is unavoidable.
  


• Lavasoft's Free Anti-Spyware Utility Ad Aware will scan your computer for spyware.
  


• Spybot's Free Anti-Spyware Search and Destroy has a built-in pop-up blocker that helps prevent spyware from being installed. It also destroys keystroke loggers.