Network Safety and Monitoring

The quest continues. How do you make your machine safe on an open network?

Well I actually got an answer from Commander Chris Wagoner over at All Experts:

All you really need to have is a good firewall, a good virus software, and one or two malware programs. I use AVG Anti-virus Pro, Spy Bot Search and Destroy (free), AdAware 2007 (free), and Tiny Personal Firewall. And I run them religiously every week...

I run the same freeware apps so I seem to be on the right track. Plus I run PeerGuardian2 which is for people who are paranoid but still want to use Bittorrent.

He also put me on to software than can watch the activity on my network. There are a few recommended apps out there, top ones seem to be Wireshark and NetworkProbe. Wireshark is probably better but it's very geeky requires more exertise than NetworkProbe which has a nice graphical user interface. Watching Wireshark is a bit like watching The Matrix data stream by.

For more network montiroing apps - check out this link.

Labels: network, security