Our personal information is precious as gems and gold as our treasure. It is something that we own and always keep in safe. It is usually marked with confidentiality. Only the authorized person can retrieve our personal information.
Computers are stored by different information about us and our work. It is loaded by different software that we used. It’s like our diary that keep record our daily task. They are like safety bolt or treasure box that hides and keeps our personal data. But, are we sure that keeping it right there will make it safe and free from hackers. There are a lot of possibilities that we should not trust right away.
Nowadays, everything is possible with those people who are knowledgeable or expert in this area. They are too inventive and experimental. Sometimes, they have valid reason in developing something new. But most of them give headaches to those who are unaware users.
Hackers corrupt information or data in our computers. It can be our contacts, credit card or security numbers that are stored in our system. They can even create or download a virus to store in our hardware that damages our system. When this happened, there’s a displaying pop-ups and unusual content appear in our desktop. Its speed performance becomes slow and unstable. If we browse the internet, our home page changes unexpectedly.
To avoid this unwanted situation, we need to be virus protected. We can download anti-virus software to our computers. There is a variety of software in the net or market to choose from. They clean and remove the viruses and give update to keep us aware about the latest bugs sent and remove from our files.
Anti-virus can detect the presence of virus in our email or file. It works automatically. But for removable USB (Universal Serial Bus) sticks, floppy disc and DVDs/CDs, we need to scan them manually and have to make this as a routine for virus protection.
To keep safe, let’s not open emails from unknown senders. It’s one way of the hackers to send viruses to the users. Spam or bulk emails should not be open unless it came from someone you know. Do not open pop ups or message boxes of advertisements because it could be one of their trick. Attachments to email should be scanned first before opening it. We should take caution when downloading application from the internet. And always keep our anti-virus software updated.
There are certain issues now about these hackers. Some of them use different credit card numbers of different users to buy in internet store. These owners are not aware that they are being robbed. The time they discovered, it may be too late. A team from Secret Agency executes a plan to catch these hackers. They were catch but still numerous hackers around the world are spreading.
What we can do is prevention. For us, to keep safe, always be careful in downloading files from different source and always double check and scan for virus.

This article is based on my own user experience of free and paid Internet security software. The free software I used consists of Sygate firewall, AVG antivirus, Ad-Aware Free Edition, Spyware Doctor and SpyBot Search & Destroy in Windows XP operating system. The paid sofware in this case is Norton Internet Security 2009 in Windows Vista operating system.

You can protect your pc against different security threats prowling on the cyberspace by using free tools. The protection these programs offer is quite good. You may wonder why an earth to use so many spyware scanners? The answer to this question is simple. One scanner was not able to detect all threats, so it was appropriate to use several. All these spyware and virus detection and removal tools worked well and did their mission. Spyware Doctor is worth to mention, because it was the only program to detect register files infection. This phenomena reduced the performance of my computer remarkably, if it appeared.

When I bought a new computer, I decided to purchase Norton Internet Security 2009. The brand name was familiar to me previously, because as a Yahoo mail user I happened to know that Yahoo scans all attachments by using Norton Antivirus. So I thought it was a good choice. I have now used  Norton Internet Security 2008 and 2009 over one year. I was able to upgrade to the new version for free. After I started to use the 2009 version, I noticed that it was more user friendly and faster than the 2008 version. Many times when I used the older version I wondered, why I have to do so many clicks in order to get my database updated. Now in this version of 2009 updating is easy and automatic as well as scanning.

The free tools I used before detected several times all kinds of spyware, adware and viruses on my computer. It seemed that there were certain “security holes” in this system through which malware was able to access into the computer. In addition, it took time to scan the computer by using several different scanners. Norton Internet Security 2009 provides more comprehensive protection against all kinds of security threats. It has antivirus, spyware protection, two-way firewall, intrusion prevention, operating system and application protection as well as web site authentication. Based on my experience, I can say that Norton Internet Security 2009 has provided a very good protection and it has kept my computer clean. It has not even detected any serious infections.