| REVIEWS
Cruising
Cyberspace
Web
Site Pick Of The Month
By Pam Wegmann
It’s 2001, a New
Year! We all make resolutions for a New Year. Regardless of
whether they fall in the personal or professional arenas, our resolutions
generally focus on making our personal or collective world a better place.
This should apply to our personal information technology world. One
of the resolutions we should make to improve our computer-based world is
to protect our systems from unwanted intruders and technology hassles.
A site that can help you do this is
www.grc.com
This is the home
of a small company out of Laguna Hills, California that specializes in
data storage management and recovery, Gibson Research Corporation.
While the purpose of GRC’s site is to sell their software products, their
site also offers some free testing services that will help you determine
your PC’s vulnerability to intrusion.
There are many unscrupulous
individuals and companies out there who send out software crawlers to find
open PC connections and then set up shop on your system. This site
will help you diagnose your exposure.
On the Home page,
you can link to several of these diagnostic tools or learn about their
freeware and software products.
Leak Test helps
determine if your personal firewall is leaking private data onto the Internet
and the OptOut link provides information on spyware. Spyware is software
that businesses use to transmit information on your Web Surfing habits.
There’s actually been legislation introduced to curb this practice and
this sub-page gives links to stories in the media about this new privacy
threat. The OptOut link also offers freeware.
You can also purchase
the site owner’s weekly “Tech Talk” column that has been published in InfoWorld
Magazine.
The ShieldsUP! Link
will test your system’s Internet Connection Security for Window’s (only)
users. Clicking on the Test My Shields! link will be granting permission
to them to connect to your PC, but their privacy statement promises that
the info will not be kept or viewed. It also provides a good, basic
discussion of personal Internet firewalls.
Once you click, it
will give you results and why. If you then click on Scanner 1 or
Scanner 2 links, you can see what the software will see and reveal.
Back on the ShieldsUP!
page, there is a button called Probe my Ports.
The results will
show you which of your ports are open and actively soliciting connections
from passing Internet port scanners.
In general, while
not the most attractive in it’s layout, the site offers tons of simply
stated, easy to understand explanations of what PC system security is all
about. It’s an excellent site for educating ourselves about what
can be the technically daunting task of system security.
Knowledge is Power!
:-)
January 2001
Questions/Comments
can be sent to pam@info-matters.com
or faxed to 504.738.0016. You can also reach Ms. Wegmann at 504.738.0070.
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