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Part 1 - Introduction

We all appreciate that perception of "success" in business is a matter of degree. Success to one person may be earning enough to pay household bills on time, have three weeks holiday a year and a new car every three. Another may settle for nothing less than being able to fly first-class to their own overseas holiday home and lease a new luxury sports coupe every 12 months.

If you operate any sort of a business, online or off, your degree of success may range from mild to outrageous. On other hand, if you are not having any success at all, you probably have other things on your mind than securing something that you don't yet have. It's not that this series doesn't apply to yet-to-be successful – it certainly should – but they probably will not allot it a very high priority.

So in essence I am aiming this series of articles more at those who are successful, or who are at least well on road to success, if only because they have most to lose. But smart beginners will do themselves a great service by riding along also.

Success in business rarely comes overnight. While it is uncommon exception to that rule that gets publicity, success is much more often result of steady progress towards a goal. That's making a complex effort sound simple, but however easy or difficult your progress, fact that you are progressing is pleasant to contemplate.

Now, what I want to do is disrupt your pleasant reverie.

I want to shatter your calm, give you something to panic about and get you thinking about a lot of bad stuff. And I want to do that not because I am a nasty little man, but because I want to help you.

A lot of bad stuff has happened to a lot of successful people online and, with every day that passes, odds increase that similar bad stuff will happen to you. The result could be as destructive as having every shred of your success wrenched from your grasp in space of moments. Many thousands of businesses, big and small, have gone to wall because they didn't adequately prepare for bad stuff I am going to tell you about.

But first I guess I need to give you a reason to read and believe.

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Part 4 - Adware and Spyware

In Part 3 of this series I stressed importance of having an anti-virus package installed on your PC, and extreme importance of keeping it current with updates from publisher of package. Unfortunately, many people who do appreciate need for such precautions fail to make an important distinction — one which leaves them exposed to threats they mistakenly believe they are protected against.

You see, while a good anti-virus program can detect and deal with many variations on virus/trojan/worm theme, it can't handle all variations. An anti-virus program is a good start, but you can't stop there. Into your defensive line-up you must add a few more specialized scanner-type programs to catch some of threats anti-virus program can't handle.

It is beyond scope of this short article to delve into differences between virus, trojan, worm, adware and spyware — nor is an understanding of characteristics of each necessary in order to effectively combat them. For more curious reader, my security Bible "The Hacker’s Nightmare" deals with all threat types in some detail. It is however necessary to appreciate that:

(a) All variations are extremely prevalent; (b) There are differences between each type of threat; (c) There can be further (sometimes significant) variations within each category; (d) There is no single antidote that will protect you against all of above.

You may recall from Part 3 that, for average home and small business computer, I generally recommend against all-in-one security suites that purport to protect you from a multiplicity of threats, so in that context point (d) above is a valid observation. For my reasons for that recommendation please refer to previous part in this series.

Don’t worry! The fact that we need several somewhat similar programs in our arsenal isn't going to impact bank balance to any significant degree. As I pointed out in previous article, many of very best solutions in this threat category are quite free. That's even more fortunate than it at first seems. While programs I use and recommend are extremely effective, they aren't perfect. Sometimes you need to install two competing programs of same type, because often one will catch intrusions that other won't, and vice versa. These programs are invariably quite small and don't place any significant load on computer, so extra protection is very worthwhile. A good example of this multi-application recommendation is adware/spyware detection.

While it has it's quirks and it does look a bit rough, in my opinion most effective software solution of all against adware & spyware is a product called Spybot-S&D (S&D stands for "Search & Destroy") from PepiMK Software. Spybot is free to both commercial and home users.