Once it's connected to the internet your computer is accessible from anywhere in the world and if you haven't taken any security measures it is extremely vulnerable, especially if you have a broadband connection where your computer can be online for very long periods. Your system could be accessed without your knowledge and attacked in many ways. A virus infection could be placed on your machine, control could be taken from you, your file system could be damaged, or any personal information kept on your computer could be copied and used for fraudulent or criminal purposes. Your computer could even be used to assist in a 'distributed denial of service attack' where many computers bombard a target system with meaningless traffic in an attempt to deny access to legitimate users.
This sounds terrifying but it's easy to protect yourself from just about any such attack by installing a personal firewall. This is a software application that controls your computer's access to and from the internet, only allowing connections that you authorise. There are many personal firewalls available free of charge and you can't get better value protection than that!
Zone Alarm from Zone Labs and Sygate from Sygate Technologies Inc. are widely recommended programs, both free for personal use. These are powerful programs and both pass the 'Shields Up' test at Steve Gibson's web site. Other applications are available from many freeware or shareware sites around the world.
'Shields Up' is a system that probes your computer's ports and tries to enter your system in much the same way as a hacker would, but benignly and for test purposes only. It will report on any weaknesses it finds so that you can take measures to protect yourself better, and if your system passes this test you can have more peace of mind whilst connected to the internet. Steve Gibson is an internationally acknowledged expert on internet security and he operates this service free from his web site - I strongly reccommend that you visit this site and have a good look around.
See my links page for software and services mentioned here.
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