About four months ago I did some fairly extensive research on the topic
of up-to-date online security apps to use on my own personal machine.
One that consistently received high scores at the time (as in within the
top three percent of effective apps) is a program developed, marketed
and maintained by a company called Emsisoft. The specific app that I use
on a monthly basis is called Emsisoft Emergency Kit, and the name pretty
much says it all. It's actually designed to get you out of some pretty
drastic and sticky situations, and although I almost never find myself
in such situations, with all the breaches happening left and right these
days, I want to know (and have proven to me via various benchmarks and a
mix of tests) that there are apps that can both protect and defend me in
the unfortunate case that anything nasty should by some nefarious manor
find its way into my system. Does that make sense? I also specifically
excluded from my research all of the oh so popular all-in-one type
security solutions. I'm just that kind of guy. I want the most effective
of everything, whether or not it happens to be made by the same, or
different, companies or individuals. I'm the kind of guy who still
believes in the value of assembling component stereo systems if that
tells you anything about me. The kind of apps I didn't want can pretty
much be summed up by the words internet security, and suite. You know,
the solutions that supposedly include antivirus, antimalware, antispam,
antifishing, anti social media attack protection, their own proprietary
white and black site lists, wifi protection, a software firewall, a data
vault, and a whatever grade data shredder, all in one, and for the low
low fee of, bla bla bla! Ahem, no. That's not at all what I was looking
for. I want highly efficient, highly effective apps that do only one
thing, and one thing well. I want solutions to protect me first, and if
that fails for whatever reason then I want the secondary solution that
is the best in its class to immediately and automatically activate, and
to start aggressively defending my stuff, and with equal amounts of
aggression, forcefully begin mitigating the damage done to my data and
system overall. To that end, I currently employ a personally
administered DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) server, network
address translation (NAT), and a hardware firewall with stateful packet
inspection capability set to high. That way, only things that I
specifically authorize are able to get through the firewall. I've
disabled ping to my gateway, disabled universal plug and play (UPNP),
disabled the wifi protected setup (WPS) service, I have changed the
default private IP address scheme, and I've assigned reserved IP
addresses with a custom subnet mask to each device that gets used on my
home network. On the software side of things, I am currently using EMET
(the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit from Microsoft), Panda free
antivirus runs daily, performing full system scans each time, and I run
Emsisoft's Emergency Kit just to be doubly sure on a schedule once a
month. I also take a peak at the Intel Management and Security status
monitor about once a week, just to make sure that what it's able to help
with continues to run smoothly, and is remaining within spec. Moving on,
on a mostly unrelated note, let's talk about Microsoft Office for a
minute. I've got the academic, or student, or some such edition of
Office 2010, and that was sent to me on CD at the time, but that was
about two years ago when I had Sterling Adaptives send me a
built-to-order system. As a dealer/distributor, they can probably get
hold of individual or hard to come by items like that quick and easy,
while doing stuff like that as individuals could potentially (and
unfortunately) be a lot more time consuming. The bottom line is this, I
don't know in light of Office 365 whether or not it's still possible to
pick up Office on physical media or not. Also, since I'm not personally
connected in any way at all to Office 365, I don't know whether even if
a person is set up in the Office 365 system, is it still possible to
download earlier/older/alternative editions of Office? I said mostly
unrelated earlier because it's arguably more important than ever that
you personally make it a point to proactively keep Microsoft Windows
itself, as well as Microsoft Office, up-to-date!
Respectfully submitted,
Brandon Dean Miller
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