Unfortunately virus checkers overlook 3 open back doors into your PC and hackers continue to exploit these vulnerabilities. Some “Reputable” companies even take advantage of one of these to track what you are doing, even when you have cookies disabled. Here are the back doors and how you can close them.
1. Auto Play Backdoor
If you insert a USB memory stick into your PC from a friend (even if your just viewing it) you could be inadvertently installing a virus or Trojan onto all your disk drives and then in turn be infecting other friends with your own now infected USB memory sticks. Auto play is enabled by default on all drives and hackers take advantage of this by writing their own auto start programs that able jump from drive to drive. Protect yourself and your friends by disabling auto start on all your drives, here is how.
- Download Tweak UI from Microsoft
- Run Tweakui and select My computer then Auto Play and then drive.
- Unselect all drives
- select Apply
2. Adobe Flash Video Backdoor
Adobe Flash allows the flash videos you watch to store information on your PC. This has been used by major companies to track your activities even when you have cookies disabled. Here is how to disable it.
- Right click on any adobe flash movie
- select settings then select Local Storage
- move the slider all the way to the left
- you should see Currently used: 0 Kb
3. Adobe PDF Reader Java script Back Door
There is a very bad vulnerability at the moment that takes advantage of this back door. See “Attack targets fully-patched adobe Reader”
Here is how to disable adobe java script
- Open up any PDF document
- Select Edit->Preferences
- Select JavaScript and ensure that the Enable Acrobat Java Script check box is un-checked.
My last parting tip is to never browse with Administrator privileges and also install the noscript plugin into your Firefox browser.
If you follow all the measures outlined here you should at least be a lot more secure than 99% of people browsing the Internet.
Regards
Danny
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About Danny Sheehan
Danny lives in Hong Kong but is originally from Australia. He is Married to Maggie and together they have two children with whom they enjoy sharing and enjoying an exciting life with daily. Danny's passions are freedom, adventure and discovery, mainly in nature and science but also spiritually. He is a great believer in living in the NOW.
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