Help & Support
Keeping your home PC safe and secure
Your own home represents the one place where you should feel most secure, and for most people, this is the case. But in this day and age, where more and more
personal computing devices are connected to the internet 24/7, we find that there is one particular point of entry most people neglect to secure properly, and that is
their PC.
We live in the appropriately-named Information Age – a time where your personal information can be more valuable than the various gadgets in your home. As such, there are a number of steps you can take to ensure that information stored or entered on your PC stays in your own hands.
Make sure your security software updates automatically
This is a golden rule. Hackers are constantly trying to find ways past your security software, while the vendors are constantly racing to patch any possible flaws and
holes. This means that the one day your software doesn’t update could be the day someone gets past your defences. Most anti-virus programs update automatically
– for example, K7’s antivirus solutions will sometimes be updated more than once per day, and they are set by default to download new updates as soon as they are
released.
Keep your OS and installed apps up to date
Your antivirus isn’t the only thing that updates regularly. Your operating system
(Windows, MacOS, Linux-derivative), browsers, and almost everything else requires regular updating – these updates usually include improvements and optimisations,
but very often they also address vulnerability issues.
Some of these applications require a bit more work on your side, but it’s a good idea to regularly check if updates are available for software on your PC.
Keeping your Windows installation up to date is vitally important, though, and you should let this happen automatically if possible.
Make sure the site you’re on is legit
How often do you come across an online ad with a deal that seems to be good to be true? Scammers are able to create sites that look 100% legitimate, down to the
finest detail, and people keep taking the bait.
If the site doesn’t seem familiar, a little time spent searching around the internet could end up saving you a lot of time, money and grief down the line.
We’ve covered many of these points in our article on staying safe when shopping online, so give it a read when you have a moment.
Your personal information is gold, and you should treat it as such
Phishing has one aim, and that is to recover as much information about you as possible. This includes login names and e-mails, passwords, and in a lot of cases
things like your login details for your internet banking profile.
There are numerous ways of doing this – such as sending e-mails asking for help moving money from an account or investing money (the infamous 419-scams), e-
mails with links to sites that are perfect replicas of login page for popular online services and banks.
There are quite a few signs that can show phishing mails and sites for what they really are, and you can familiarise yourself with them by checking out our article
about phishing attacks.
As always … password
Always invest a bit of time when choosing a password - for anything. Never use the same password for more than one online account, since having an account
compromised automatically means your other accounts are also in danger.
We’ve also given some tips on creating a strong password for yourself – so go take a look at it.
Back up your important data regularly
In the event your computer does get compromised, another risk you face includes losing access to all your important files – be they movies, documents, music or even
photos of a special event. To prevent this kind of loss, it’s a good idea to schedule backups of such data – a functionality included in K7’s Ultimate Security version. Download and activate the 30-day trial version and try it out for yourself.
Backing up on a separate drive or partition in your PC is worthwhile, but ideally you should back up this data on an external drive that isn’t connected to your PC all the
time.
Happy computing
Jaydon van Gent
K7 Computing
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