How to protect your home computer on the cheap. Part 1.

Every day we see users who we feel are tremendously "over protected". So how much protection is too much? How much protection do you actually need? Do you really need a bloated and expensive security suite? Probably not. In this article we'll take a look at the most well known threat, viruses. In the next few articles we'll also look at spyware, firewalls, various other threats, and what you can do to protect your computers inexpensively. We'll try to provide you with the information you need to make informed decisions about the level pf protection you really need, and hopefully save you some hard earned money.

Viruses - The dreaded "V" word. Yes, there are viruses out there. A few years ago, viruses were designed to damage your computer or data in some way. They were usually created by somewhat talented but misguided programmers with too much time on their hands and not enough in the way of conscience to realize the damage they were causing. Fortunately, there are not many of these left today, and oddly enough, many of the viruses users encounter are actually several years old. There are even viruses out there that are actually harmless and some that were created to kill other viruses. Go figure. Still, you need virus protection and we always recommend that users have an anti-virus application installed and keep it updated.

Viruses these days are much less likely to be destructive. In fact, whoever creates the virus would probably prefer that your computer is running smoothly. Why? Because they want to borrow it from time to time. Hackers and computer criminals figured out that viruses can be profitable so rather than damage your computer or data, they want to recruit your computer to be a soldier in their criminal enterprises.

You may have heard the term Zombie used in the context of a computer viral infection. These are not the same type of zombies you see roaming the cemetery in old 1960's horror movies. These are the new, improved, electronic zombies of the 21st century. They infect your computer and usually just sit there until they are called upon to do something. They will periodically check in for instructions from a hackers computer and when they receive them, they carry them out. They may send spam or participate in attacks against other computers. They are particularly nasty because they allow the hacker to control thousands of unsuspecting users computers. These are typically referred to as "Botnets".

The most prevalent use of viruses today is to create these botnets. And the most common way botnets are used is to send spam or for phishing schemes. Anti-spam software has become extremely sophisticated over the past few years, and spammers and scammers have had a harder time getting their emails delivered. Spam spewing servers are easily identified and the alert goes out all overt the world when one is. It is much harder to identify the hundreds of thousands of personal computers used as zombies by these botnets and the bad guys have figured this out.

To illustrate the potential profit these botnets can generate for the hacker, let's assume a hacker has a modest botnet of 10,000 infected computers. Each of these computers might generate 50,000 fake email messages over a 30 day period. That is a total of 500,000,000 (500 MILLION!) messages that go out for free. Whatever the hackers scam is, if he can average $1 on just .01% of the messages he sends using his botnet (1 out of 10,000), he stands to net $50,000 a month. That's a pretty lucrative deal. A hacker would much rather make a lot of money than delete some files from your computer, and that is what they are doing.

The bottom line is you do need a competent anti-virus program. Make sure you keep it updated, so make it a habit to regularly check your license expiration date.

In part 2 of this series of articles, we'll discuss Spyware and what you need to be concerned about. So, please check back!