Safe Web surfing - Protect against malware

Safe Web surfing

Let’s face it, a lot of adults like to use the internet for porn, gambling and other such pursuits. A major problem with this is that these types of sites are often full of virus and trojan traps. Surf porn for a month without taking major precautions and you will have trojans and virii on your machine. It doesn’t even have to be a ‘questionable’ site. One of our clients got a particularly nasty virus from an automobile site.

There are some steps that you can take to make your surfing a little safer. You cannot eliminate risks entirely but you can reduce your risks.

Of course, you need to start with a stable system that has not been compromised. An existing trojan or virus will sometimes open the door for other infections. Make sure that you have all of your windows patches up to date, you are running a current antivirus and you have a firewall in place. You should also be running anti spyware applications such as Ad Aware and Spybot search and destroy.
Use XP to set up a separate user for risky surfing. Windows XP has two types of users: Administrators and Limited Users. Set the account up as an administrative user first. Later we will make this user a limited user. By being a limited user you prevent some virus programs from installing themselves because, by definition, limited users do not have full rights. Also, if you encounter a stubborn virus, you can delete the entire user and all of their files without losing your crucial data. For now, though, we need to be an administrator in order to get Mozilla Firefox installed successfully.
Load a browser other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer such as the Mozilla Firefox. IE is more virus prone than some of the other browsers simply because of it's larger installed base. Go through the setup of the browser to tweak anything related to security such as disabling activeX controls. You can download and install Firefox from your regular user account. You will then need to 'switch-to' the new user you created.
Once you have switched to the new user, run firefox once. Again, Firefox needs to be run the first time on an account as an administrative user. Once you have run Firefox, log out of your new user account.
From your regular account (which is still an administrator), go to the control panel and change the user type of the new account to 'limited user'.
When you want to surf in dangerous neighborhoods, switch users to log in as the limited user. Make sure that account is set up with your non IE browser as the default browser. Also, make sure that your antivirus and firewall applications are up and running.
When you are done browsing log off of your limited user account. You should be running full antivirus scans on a regular basis. It also pays to run a full scan periodically from safe mode. (both antivirus and anti spyware).

If you are consistent with this plan, any spyware or drive by download has to (1) be able to hook into Firefox and (2) bypass the Windows security applied to a limited user.

IMPORTANT NOTE - The procedures above cannot guarantee safe surfing in dangerous neighborhoods. All they can do is reduce your risk of getting hit with a virus.

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