Rob Pegoraro at the Washington Post has a great article which makes tons of sense. It’s all about how to shore up your brand new computer’s protection against Internet nasties before the nasties have a chance to attack. You know, the old “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.

Pegoraro makes a really good point. Many of us set up our present computers before the current explosion of hacking, spyware, malware, etc.. So many of the things we have done to secure our computers were just so many bandaids after the fact. Now we know about the goblins out there, and so making our brand new computers as secure as possible before connecting them to the Internet makes perfect sense to even the most brand new of users.

Here are the things which Pegoraro reminds us to do:

1. Be sure to install a firewall, and turn it on!

2. Find every security patch available for your new computer, and download and install it. Pegoraro advises not to do anything else on the Internet - anything at all - until you have downloaded and installed every last security patch. And rightly so, says Aunty. And, he reminds us… [Continued…]