Yesterday, Microsoft released another 8 software patches for its products including Internet Explorer (IE) to fix some fairly critical security holes in these products. Many of them allow malicious persons (e.g. hackers) to take complete control over of your PC.

This brings the total number of security vulnerabilities with Internet Explorer over the past 2 years to 80 of which 19 remain unpatched. As a comparison, Firefox, an alternative free browser, had only 14 vulnerabilities of which 5 are still unpatched.

Read on for ways to protect yourselfI would recommend to anyone wanting to protect their PCs from attack from the Internet to download and install Firefox and stop using Internet Explorer. Firefox has many features that are not in IE and which provide a better browsing experience. It also has many "Extensions" available which can be easily downloaded to add more functionality.

Additionally, if you do not have firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed you should do so immediately. All of these can be obtained for free (including automatic updates) and work extremely well in detecting "nasties" before they do any damage.

The following software is recommended:

Internet Browser: Firefox
Firewall: ZoneAlarm
Anti-Virus: AVG
Anti-Spyware: Ad-Aware
Anti-Spyware: Spybot

Note: Download and install both anti-spyware programs for best protection.
Note: When installing ZoneAlarm, it will ask whether you wish to load ZoneAlarm Pro or ZoneAlarm Free. Make sure you select the free edition or else it will expire within 30 days.

If you are not very technical savvy, some of the above programs may be a bit of challenge to install and configure. If you do have problems, some technical support is available from myself (peter AT hpdp.org.au) or Henare (henare AT hpdp.org.au). Standard schooner labour rates will apply for email support.

Good luck and safe surfing.

Peter T