I just wanted to share some thoughts with you about keeping yourself and your computers safe. It’s more important than ever to be sure you’re protecting your computers and servers from the many threats online. It’s better and much easier to protect yourself from threats rather than get rid of them once they are on your system.

Many people don’t understand why after a serious infection we have to completely erase the computer hard drive and start over from scratch. Steve Gibson ( www.grc.com ), arguably the top security guru in the world said this in his most recent episode of “Security Now!” “…if your machine has been compromised, you can never trust it again. There isn’t any way to know what it is that was changed. And in fact when, you know, I’ve talked to some people who are sort of old-school sticklers for, ‘oh, I know what every single file on my machine is’, you know, back from the DOS days. And there have been some friends who have spent weeks trying to get stuff removed after an infection. And you really cannot do it.

It turns out that, the way this malware has evolved now, it’s so insidious and sinks itself so deep into the system and, renames files and sticks itself in places you don’t know to look and is able to hook itself in so that it gets started up in many different scenarios… First of all, you don’t ever – you will never again, by definition, be able to trust the system. And secondly, you just can’t get rid of it. It won’t go away… I mean, there just isn’t a way you can trust a machine that was taken over. ” (transcript found here: http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-147.htm )

Make sure your computer and programs are updated and your security software is up to date. Security software is not optional. Be careful out there.