PC Maintenance and Security

I found the tutorials on Atomic Learning so interesting, I really wanted to watch all of them. Since I don't know very much about maintenance and security, I probably will go back and view more of them for my own benefit. After watching several, I found the continued discussion about malware to be very interesting so I decided to use three consecutive tutorials on this particular topic.


The first tutorial I chose to write about was titled Defining Malware. I have never really known what Malware, Spyware, or Adware were. I will go out on a limb and expose how naive I am about my computer and tell you that I thought Spyware was a software that was good to have because it detected viruses or people trying to "spy" into my information. In this tutorial, malware was explained to be short for "malicious software" and a catch all phrase used to describe all harmful software. I found it very interesting that according to statistics, over 90 per cent of all computers are afflicted by malware. That's not good when I later found out from another tutorial that computers are infected through so many things that are shared between computers. While most people are much more informed about their computers than I am (although the numbers conveyed by statistics show otherwise), I probably won't share this information with people because of the fear of getting laughed at. I have other information to share from the other tutorials.....


The second tutorial, titled Understanding How Malware Spreads, was even more fascinating to me and truly made me think I couldn't afford to own a computer unless I started putting some protection on it. I am currently using my new laptop and in discussing all this information with my husband, he mentioned that our son had installed AVG(?) on his computer. Well, it seems he forgot to do that to mine!!!!!!! So I will take care of protecting my own computer, I guess.


I was amazed to learn that so many "normal things" we do in our daily lives when we're on the computer can actually spread malware from computer to computer. I knew not to open SPAM or any strange email but I was unaware that email attachments, file sharing, and Instant Messaging could spread viruses. Since these are things that I must do, it's one more reason to get to work on getting my computer protected!


The last tutorial that I would like to describe was titled Problems Found on Unprotected Computers. In this tutorial, it was explained how to protect one's computer from being infected. I was unaware that so many spyware components, including tracking cookies, were on most computers - anywhere from 100 to 5000. The first thing that was suggested for a safer computer was to get a more secure web browser than Internet Explorer. Of course, I had to share this right away with my family and I was told that that was why we have Google Chrome as our web browser. Cool, I thought. That takes care of one thing. The other suggestions were all things that I already learned in our PC Maintenance lecture. However, before taking this course, I thought that all I needed was a firewall. 
   
In summary, I think I'm really learning some very valuable information in this course. Thanks so much!