Tutorial: Protecting Yourself From Malware

With all the help these forums have provided me over the years, I wanted to give something back to the community, and this tutorial is it.

By day I am a PC Tech and have been doing this for over 20 years. Recently I have put the following regime on to customer's PC's. And with over 300 installs only 1 PC was ever infected with one minor piece of spyware, so by following the examples given you should protect yourself from 99.95% of any Virus, Malware, Spyware or any other nasties which plague the Internet.

1) First up is AV or AntiVirus and the questions I am asked the most is which one should I use and free or paid?

If you install an AV with software 2 below then free is fine, if you want to use just an AV program by itself (which I do not recommend) then paid is the way to go in the form of either Kaspersky Anti-Virus or ESET NOD32 Antivirus (Kaspersky being my first choice) BUT if you are doing this the way I recommend then FREE offerings are ok. I used to recommend Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) but of late have been recommending avast! Free Antivirus 2014 as this has a better detection rate.

RECAP: Vista and Windows 7 use avast! Free Antivirus 2014. Windows 8 users use the supplied Windows Defender.

2) MalwareBytes Pro - MalwareBytes comes as either a free version or a paid pro offering. I recommend you pay the one off fee (and its not yearly like some AV programs) for the Pro version as this provides real-time active malware prevention, heuristic protection and protects against malicious Website content. The FREE version does not provide real-time protection and thus is only good for malware cleanup and is no good for preventing it, thus the recommendation for the pro version.
NOTE: This is the only piece of software you will need to purchase and it will be the best $25 you have ever spent.
RECAP: Buy MalwareBytes Pro life-time license for $25

3) Firewall - Now there's lots of Firewall software out there BUT users of Windows Vista, 7 and 8 should just use the built in firewall included within Windows. Windows XP users - Come on its time to upgrade to either Windows 7 or 8!

RECAP: Windows Vista, 7 and 8 users should stick t6i the supplied firewall included with Windows.

4) Install WOT (Web Of Trust) for all installed browsers:

Web of Trust (WOT) is a website reputation and review service that helps people make informed decisions about whether to trust a website or not. WOT is based on a unique crowdsourcing approach that collects ratings and reviews from a global community of millions of users who rate and comment on websites based on their personal experiences.

WOT is available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and a bookmarklet is available for other browsers which will enable you to tell which websites you can trust based on millions of users' experiences.

RECAP: Install WOT for all your installed browsers.

5) OpenDNS - Changing your DNS to use the OpenDNS servers will protect you from malware by automatically blocking known and predicted malicious domains and IPs from resolving at the DNS layer. Its really easy to configure and is an extra layer of protection.

RECAP: Setup OpenDNS on your Router or Internet Browser by using their easy setup instructions.

6) CryptoPrevent - You may have heard of the Cryptolocker malware or "ransomware" which encrypts personal files and then offers decryption for a paid ransom. Its a nasty piece of "ransomware" which can be removed but unfortunately all your files will be encrypted and the only way of using/reading your files will be to pay the $200 plus ransom. Unfortunately there is currently no way around the encryption BUT preventing it in the first place is what we all should be doing.
And that is where CryptoPrevent comes in. Using an easy tick box interface CryptoPrevent artificially implants group policy objects into the registry in order to block certain executables in certain locations from running.

And that is it, as I stated earlier, if you follow these 6 steps it will considerably help protect you from the majority of infections waiting behind the corners of the World Wide Web