Installing a firewall may help to protect your network, however this will work only if the firewall is properly configured. Let’s see what are the main principles of firewall configuration.

1. Protect your system
A firewall is only a part of your protection. Start with disabling unused accounts and close unnecessary ports on PCs.

2. The easier the better
Before adding any rules to your firewall software, define the principles, on which your security will be based on. It is a good idea to remove all the default rules that a firewall has upon the installation and start from the very beginning, adding your own rules one by one.

3. Strict security means Strict security
Your network should have only allowed traffic. Everything that’s not allowed, must be disallowed. Start with disallowing all the traffic by default and then allow it only for the services that really need it.

4. Monitor your outbound traffic
Usually people think that they only need protection from external threats. But it’s also important to monitor your outbound traffic. This will help you avoid situations when your servers are used as zombie computers within a botnet.

5. Firewall is only a part of Security

Don’t think that if you have a firewall installed, you are safe enough to forget about other components of security. Don’t forget to update your anti-virus, don’t visit the sites that Firefox filters off and be careful at sites that ask for any of personal information except for your name and email number.

Last year “Kaspersky Lab” reported that 24 million users had been attacked from Internet. The experts warn of increasing number of social network attacks and huge growth of the number of malware used to steal credentials for online games. Another urgent problem that grows in a scary fast pace is spread of rootkits. Rootkits are special tools used to hide malicious software on a user’s system by takeover of control over system functions or data structures. Botnets become more and more widespread and therefore represent one more critical threat in the modern IT world.

At the same time electronic junk mail distribution has not grown significantly. Avarage part of junk in email traffic has reached 82.1% — this is 2.1% more than in 2007. The world’s leader of spam discribution is Russian Federation (22%).

The experts predict that the situation will get much worse in 2009. What can be done to avoid distressing consequences? Do as much as possible to protect your PC, your mobile devices, your network environment and your private data. Update your antivirus daily, use a firewall, be careful when paying at internet shops and subscribe for a website monitoring account in order to know first if your blog has been defaced or infected by a malware.

This post is sponsored by:  Oscommerce Templates

It’s a tangled web, the intricate knitting started with exploiting CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart-in case you never knew) vulnerabilities to set up email accounts, which are required to set up blogs and/or profiles on social networks with enough traffic and clout to pop up in the search results.

Google’s Blogspot has been a popular target for splogs (spam blogs) because of the cost-free simplicity of setting one up. MessageLabs Intelligence’s latest report shows Blogspot is still a popular target, as is social networking site Bebo.

The first specific example given by MessageLabs involves MobileMe (formerly mac.com) and Blogspot. The mac.com email address-jxfkjxfosb-seems obviously machine generated, and the addressor’s name is as random. It doesn’t take security experts to know an email form jersey cow ribbons, shadow assimilate, is likely a fake, especially if the subject line is about “Che*-pest meds we have.”

Along with the email is a link to a Blogspot blog, and once followed leads to what appears to be a real blog lame enough to be titled “My Blog,” but with an actually cogent post (weirdly dated and supplemented with Japanese script). But after a few seconds the visitor is redirected United Pharmacy, the “#1 Internet Online Drugstore” site, as opposed to the “Best Outside Not Inside Drugstore” or the “#1 Large Big Feline Cat Shop Store.”

Being able to automate email address creation also makes it easier to set up accounts around the Web. MessageLabs searched on Google for “Cialis,” and in the top three search results was a spam profile set up on Bebo. We weren’t able to reproduce, perhaps because Google caught on. On page 4 for the same term on the American site, we did find a result linking to gaming site Kongregate. Cialis says announces on (his?) profile “Enough to seek Cialis!” indicating, we think, you can stop looking now.

Point is, this is all a bit higher level than traditional spamming: CAPTCHA breaking, automated account/content creation, interlinked media and search placement. Think how well these folks’d do if they did legitimate work. It also makes it trickier to deal with. Things can look legit but aren’t, so the standard advice still goes: don’t follow strangers around on the Internet.

Jason Lee Miller, securitypronews.com