In this episode of the TechCast Weekly Computer Knowledge Podcast, Michael Paul discusses the topic of wireless network security.  Wireless networking has become all the rage due the ease of setup, increasing data transfer rates, and cheaper equipment.  Wireless networks offer and easy way to share internet access among several computers, but they can open your computer to outsiders.  A good security plan should be on the mind of anyone wanting to use a wireless network. Learn why in this week’s episode of the TechCast Weekly and learn how you can easily setup your wireless network security plan with Network Magic.

Learn about the WEP encryption standard and why you shouldn’t use it, and find out why the WPA standard is the preferred choice for wireless network security.

Episode: 31

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Adware and Spyware Defined at FreeIQ

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With the popularity of and the reliance on the Internet by almost the whole world’s population, there are suddenly a lot of things you can do and know with literally one click of the mouse. Making purchases nowadays doesn’t require you to go to the shop or store; you can buy items online. Researching for various pieces of information can now be accomplished via the Internet.

However, there is an unfortunate reality that goes along with the wonders of the Internet. You can also the Internet that computer security is, and always will be, an issue. With the continued growing of the reliance of people (including businessmen, offices, government officials, and more) on computers and the Internet, this is a more important issue than what most believe.

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Just a heads up to make sure that you are updating your systems.  Yesterday, December 12, was Patch Tuesday for Microsoft (It should speak volumes to you that this company has a scheduled day of the month to send out fixes for their software.  It’s like they know that there’s things that need to be fixed.)  Included in the update are six patches, five of which are for Windows.

According to Ed Oswald at BetaNews, there will be no patch for a zero-day flaw in Word 2003 and earlier versions of Word. Microsoft is working on a patch for this problem, but just couldn’t get it done in time for this month’s edtion of Patch Tuesday.

Great.  Now you won’t be able to use Word for a month.

Also, expect an update to the Malicious Software Removal Tool as well.  Of course, if they didn’t have to have these Patch Tuesdays, you probably wouldn’t need the Malicious Software Removal Tool.  I’m not saying that you should never have to update software.  That’s ridiculous.  There are always going to be issues that need to be resolved because no matter how many tests you run on something, there will be one situation that arises that you didn’t think of.  And with a company the size of Microsoft, those situations happen more often than not.

But don’t you think it would make more sense to only send out patches as they are needed, not set aside a day of the month and mark it like it’s some holiday?  Makes sense to me.

Lots of stuff going on this week, from the TechPodcasts Roundtable Christmas show to the best way for you to make money while surfing the web. Since we’re heading into the online shopping season (Cyber Monday was earlier this week, one of the busiest days for online shopping), I thought it would be appropriate to give a little advice on passwords, lest you are a victim of identity theft or have somebody looting your bank account. You can avoid a ton of headaches using the techniques in this week’s show and keep those passwords safe and secure.

Let’s be honest, passwords are annoying. These days, we need a password or PIN everywhere. We have so many that we can’t keep track of them all. We forget to update them; and when we do, it’s difficult to come up with effective ones that we can still remember, so we procrastinate changing them for months, even years. We all know this is bad, but the alternative – the painful, irritating password creation and memorization process – is sometimes more than we can tolerate. There is hope! Passwords don’t have to be complex cryptograms. A few simple methods can help make living with passwords a little easier.

During the show this week, I talk about making a secure password and what to avoid in your passwords (like using a pet’s name or your social security number). I mentioned a page on the GRC site (headed up by Steve Gibson of Security Now! and TWiT fame) that creates extremely complex passwords each time the page is viewed. If you want a really secure password, just visit the site and grab yours for nothing.

If you’re interested in using a password management tool, look no further than Roboform to keep track of all your passwords, forms and even generate passwords for you. Roboform is one of the most useful pieces of software I’ve ever seen, and it’s also one of the most highly recommended on the market today. With over 11 million downloads and accolades from the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, PC Magazine, CNET and more, Roboform is the way to go to keep your passwords and login information secure.

This week’s music by Farewell Redemption - Hangin’ On

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Your kids are online.  And more than likely, you probably aren’t aware of what they are doing online.  You’re not up to speed on MySpace (frankly, something that I just don’t get but, I do have a page on MySpace), Instant messaging (which can be a great substitute for high cell phone or long distance bills), file-sharing, or anything else that is “hip” with the kids these days.  (Yes, I just used the term “hip”.  Be glad it wasn’t “rad” or “awesome”.)

It’s ok for your kids to be online.  Don’t think that by preventing them access to the internet that you are going to protect them from the evil that lurks in the dark places frequented by strange, middle-age men that never see the light of day and play online role-playing games for 30 or 40 hours straight.  Don’t think that by blocking access to the internet that you kids are going to be just the most wonderful little children and stay away from the evil Internet even when they are not at home.  Don’t be that naive.  Your kids can access the Internet from almost anywhere, some of them even on their cell phones. When they go over to a friend’s house, you can bet that at some point they are going to be sitting down in front of the screen watching the lastest batch of stupid human tricks that someone has posted on YouTube or Google Video.  They’ll be on MySpace, chatting with someone about who is doing what at school this week and where they are going on vacation for spring break and how many kegs of beer are going to be at Johnny’s party on Friday night while his parents are out of town.  I’m trying not to make a blanket statement about everyone’s kids, I’m sure that yours are not the type that will get together and rip and run through the streets, causing massive amounts of mayhem and all sorts of social disturbances.  They don’t have to any more.  They have the internet.

The Internet, once a place conceived of by scientists and governments to connect their various organizations together to enable the sharing of information quickly has become something altogether different.  But the Internet is what you and your children make of it.

The Internet can be a repository of information greater than any encyclopedia that has ever been or will ever be published.  Not only can you read about historic places on the Internet, you can visit them with the power of online videos and web sites based in foreign lands that offer a wealth of information that makes the experience that much more fulfilling.  Your kids have access to information that previously would have taken them hours to find in a library full of books. Thanks to search engines like Google, directories like Yahoo!, the world is at your children’s fingertips.  Unfortunately, your children are also at the world’s fingertips.

Just beyond that shelter of your home and your computer lies a gateway to a world filled with some pretty disturbed individuals.  And they have taked this wonderful tool and have perverted it for their own selfish, twisted desires.

And I’m not just talking about the child molesters that are trying to steal your kids away from you.  There’s also the spammers that are out there trying to get control of your computer and use it as a launching pad to send out more spam to others, and then take over their systems as well.  People who won’t take their intellect and use it to make an honest living are using their brains to figure out how to take your hard-earned cash and put it in their pockets.

These are only a few of the dangers that lie in wait for your children as they are surfing the web and chatting it up with their friends online.  The language of instant messages befuddles most adults and they have no idea what their kids are discussing while online.

I’m not writing all of this to freak you out.  My job here is to make computers easier to understand and use.  That means all areas of computers, not just how to burn a CD or DVD or use that cool new photo editing program.

Knowing how to keep your kids safe online is a responsibility that most parents have to tackle in our society.  More and more households have computers in their homes, and most that have a computer have some type of internet access.  Your kids will be online, whether they are online at home with you watching or not.  You must take an aggressive stance in keeping your kids safe while they are on the computer.

One of those first steps to keep your kids safe is to move that computer into the family room or living room.  Setup that PC in a public place in your house.  I’m of the opinion that every one is entitled to a little privacy in their lives, even kids.  They have their own rooms and should be allowed some level of privacy in that room.  Your computer, though… that can be a different story.

It’s highly unlikely that a stranger is going to walk into your kids’ room and try to tempt them into coming along to a secluded encounter.  Hopefully if they tried, you would tackle them before they got there.  Online, this happens everyday.

Be aware of what your kids are doing on the computer.  You could be saving their lives, and maybe yours, too.  More on keeping your kids safe online to come…

Phishing scams and online fraud are probably the two biggest problems facing Internet surfers today. From pop-up windows telling you that “There are 37 critical errors on your PC, click on this link to fix them” and other such garbage that tricks you into visiting a website designed for the sole purpose of stealing your personal information, the average computer user can be ill-protected to fend off these threats to Internet security. But there is hope.

Many of the next versions of the more popular web browsers are incorporating anti-phishing technology into their design. Opera announced that the next version, 9.1, of their web browser will include anti-phishing technology. Beta releases of both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 have incorporated this technology as well.

It’s all fine and dandy that these companies are taking the time to write these features into the code for the browsers. Basically what will happen is when you click a link to a site that is referenced in a database of known phishing or fraud sites, you’ll get a warning not to visit said site. Which is pretty cool.

But what happens if you don’t have the latest versions of these browsers? First off, get them as soon as they become available. That’s a good rule of thumb for any software. If the company has released an update, it’s not just because they had nothing else to do that day. Whether the updates are critical or not, your software is being updated for a reason. Don’t blow it off, take the time to download the updates.

In the meantime, just be careful. Be wary of any strange offers coming from someplace that you have never visited. Don’t pay attention to those silly “warnings” offering some magic one-click fix to all the errors on your system. Use your head and you’ll keep your information and your computer safe from the perils of phishing scams and online fraud attacks.

People ask me this all the time, “Mike, my computer is acting funny, running slowly, (insert various other computer ailments) and I’m worried that I might have picked up a (insert your favorite cause of the aforementioned computer ailments). What should I do now?”

Here’s the problem. Most of the time it’s too late to do anything really effective once your computer has been infected with a virus, trojan horse, worm, or some other type of malicious software. It’s the preventive maintenance that you have to do on your PC to keep things running smoothly and virus-free.

Here’s 3 things that you can do right now to improve your internet security situation. (And the best part is, all of them are free!)

• #1. Stop using Internet Explorer to do your web surfing. Even with the upcoming release of IE7, I still feel much safer surfing the web in either Firefox or Opera. Inherently safer, inherently faster, inherently easier to tailor to your needs, just better all the way around. And until you’ve surfed the web tabbed-browsing style, you haven’t surfed at all.
• #2. Make sure your Automatic Updates in Windows are turned ON Microsoft tries really hard to keep their software updated and work to fix any security risks as quickly as possible. However, if you don’t check for updates or have your automatic updates turned on, they can do you no good.
• #3. Make sure your antivirus program is up to date. Most of the antivirus publishers update their virus definitions weekly. If you’re not keeping things updated, you might as well not have an antivirus program.

This is by no means all that you need to do to enhance your internet security, but it’s a start. I know for a fact it’s more than what most of the people I talk to are doing right now. I don’t mean to rant, but this is a sticking point with me. Lots of people don’t know how to keep their computers virus and spyware free, so I’ve deemed it my personal mission to tell as many people as I can how they can do it.

Try these for yourself. Just switching web browsers will make a ton of difference. I’ve had first-hand experience. Try it today.