Myspace viruses/How to regain internet safety!

This is an addendum to Myspace maybe killing your computer blog. I’ve received a lot of hits for that post. Most of the hits are coming from people who have received viruses from “Myspace.” They search about viruses from Myspace and somehow find my page. I say somehow because of the incredible number of postings out there on this subject. I

I decided to test two of the major search engines only using the wording “Myspace viruses.” The first search site that I check out was Yahoo and I found 5,380,000 entries. Wow! The second search site I reviewed was Google and it had 662,000 entries on the subject. They both had some good pages but didn’t cover everything I want to cover. That makes for a lot of trial and error. You don’t have time to search when you have viruses. Then you still run a chance of miss information and/or finding nothing. Very frustrating!

Let’s get to the heart of it. You run a risk of viruses and spyware anytime you have a networked community that lets you use your own HTML. Hackers love these types of sites. You have a lot of people that are recreational internet users. They have a basic knowledge of how to get around and where to find HTML. It is a Hackers dream.

I’ve picked a few good sites to visit and provided more information below:

1) Get yourself protected!!! You need antivirus, spyware remover, pop-up blocker and a firewall. It isn’t really an option anymore. There are horrible people in the world that really have nothing better to do than mess with you.
a) Get it Free. Check out this article on it. http://tinyurl.com/32fjb5  
b) As always I like www.download.com (They have everything you need. Plus, articles explaining things to you.)
c) I’m using a new spyware protector: http://tinyurl.com/3hgxj  It is free… try it out.
d) Make sure to update often. You need to run your protection programs every once and awhile. Especially after you have visited a questionable site, been redirected and received a pop-ups.

2) Use Myspace more wisely. This article covers a lot of the things you should be doing to protect yourself on MySpace. http://tinyurl.com/2mz93y  The abridged version: Put your page on private, change your friend request setting, keep an eye out for bad pages, change your password often, scrutinize unusual requests and use Tom. He is your friend and has good info.

3) In addition, don’t click on the Macy’s cards (delete them), don’t click on anything that looks to good to be true; don’t download songs or anything else. Just read what Mark had to say about it on TechRepublic. http://tinyurl.com/yrvc6a

4) Never give your personal information on the web and don’t keep it on your computer (like credit card numbers.) Limit the use of your real name and come up with an internet handle. I use ebob04 for this page and twitter.

5) If you think you have a virus. Close all programs right away. I personally don’t recommend shutting down because your computer may never start again. I do recommend unhooking your internet from your computer and go into a safeboot. Do this right after you update your protection programs (side-note: some protection software will only run if you have internet access.) In this case, you will have to leave your system up. To get into a safeboot: Go to Run, type in Msconfig, go to the BOOT.INI TAB, click safeboot and click ok. It will prompt you to restart. Do it. Then run you protection program and you should run Defrag from there too (see original article.) To get out of the safeboot do the same steps but unclick the safeboot box.

6) http://tinyurl.com/yoyw4p is a helpful article with lots of sites to help you and Hijack iT! helps too (can be found on download.com)

I hope this helps you continue to keep your computer safe. All the above information pertains to all of the internet and not just MySpace. I may have missed a few things. Please check my original blog on this subject “Myspace may be killing your computer.” As always let me know if you need more information and/or just give me some feedback.  

Good luck and I hope to hear from you all.