ShieldsUP! – on GibsonResearchCorporation (GRC)

I am by no means an internet security expert, however I do know that we all have to do what we can to ensure that we protect ourselves’ on the internet as best we can. Of course protecting our passwords and ensuring that our passwords are strong is great (there’s links on the website about how to build a strong password too!), being mindful of the types of websites we visit and the links that we click on is also really important (you don’t want to end up downloading something onto your system that allows some hacker access). Thats why I thought I would do a quick post to spread the word about this quick and easy to use tool I have found.

Let me explain a little about how it works. Basically this tool attempts to get past your internet firewall in order to report back to you and tell you how secure it is. Essentially if you connect your computer to the internet through a ‘router’ be it one that you plug an ethernet cable into or use wirelessly you have made the first step as this becomes a firewall for you. Although in order for the computer to send and receive information it must do this through ‘ports’, so ports are kind of like doors in your firewall. You can have them open or closed or only allowed to open one way, essentially you want them all in a state that only allows your computer to speak outwards and nothing to be able to come back the other way as this offers you protection and no hackers can get access to your computer – they just can’t see it.

Running this tool will scan for all of these ports on your firewall and see which ones are vulnerable. The tool will report back to you by saying that a port is either open, closed or in stealth mode. Open is obviously open and is a vulnerability to you – this means that its an open doorway and someone can waltz straight in. Closed means that the port is closed – the door is closed and locked but it does let a hacker know that there is a network connected to the internet which they may choose to further investigate for other vulnerabilities. By far the best position to be in is stealth. This means that the ‘doors’ are locked up and secured, but they can’t even be seen on the internet by anybody looking for vulnerable computers. This is the aim!!

So my suggestion is to jump onto the site, run the tool and have at least a little more peace of mind in that your computers running on the home network are sitting behind a wall that can’t be seen by the nasties out there on the net. It only takes the best part of five minutes to see how secure you are so why not do it???

Since I discovered status updates in Facebook, what seems to be a long time ago now. I have used it pretty much constantly, updating my status all the time. But then along came Twitter, now I didn’t quite understand twitter at first but as I listened to other’s who have used it and understood more about it, it’s slowly grown on me. I love twitter for the simple reason that you can recieve updates from only the people you want to recieve them from and you don’t have to worry about reading through some of the garbage that goes through Facebook. Over the course of about a year I have found myself now tweeting constantly and forgetting all about Facebook status updates.

On one hand Facebook updates allow all of my friends and family to know what I’m doing as they are on that social network and haven’t yet taken up the Twitter craze. However since purchasing my iPhone about 9 months ago it has been so much easier to use a single app which is solely dedicated to posting updated via ‘tweets’, and because my attention span seems to be a little short sometimes I find myself not bothering to update Facebook. I think that twitter is something that needs to be used hand in hand with something like an iPhone or Blackberry, because you have to be able to jump on and update it randomly. Having to go to the twitter website kind of defeats the purpose.

Never the less I have just found a facebook app that allows your twitter feed to be automatically fed into your facebook status update, therefore updating both at once. I’m not sure if I’m going to find that usefull or annoying as sometimes I like to keep the two separate, another thought, how would it go if you have to do an @reply. Nobody on facebook is going to know what your talking about?!!? We shall see

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