This morning I was forwarded an article about a NSS Labs test of security suites by NetSafe Board member and IBM Security Specialist John Martin. The full report will cost you $495 USD, but the headline findings are enough to get you thinking…

“NSS Labs: Most antivirus software misses hacker exploits half the time”.

The best product tested scored 100%, whilst the worst scored 29%. NSS Labs reported that based on market share – 70 to 75% of the market was under protected.

That all sounds a bit frightening. Thankfully, security software is not the only thing that secures a computer. Securing a computer properly requires a combination of things that we refer to as the NetBasics.

As you do each of the NetBasics, you decrease the vulnerability of your computer. It is true that no computer is ever completely safe – but you certainly don’t have to present a soft target. For more information see the NetBasics or the security sectionof the NetSafe.org.nz site.

For those of you interested in computer security (and who use twitter), you can also follow John Martins twitter feed (you’ll find him under “Caute_cautim”).

Think twice before giving cold calling strangers access to your computer for virtual health checks

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Poor Winston Reid, he doesn’t know what to do. By the time he got back on the bus after the All White’s draw with Slovakia he had “over 100 messages and 40 missed calls. I went onto Facebook and that was horrible as well. It was swamped. Where do I start? If I start answering [...]