Protecting Your Computer from Malicious Software

Last Friday morning, my computer caught a nasty virus. Luckily for me, I was fairly well-prepared and caught it before too much damage was done. It will still cost me $190 to get it fixed and I'm without my main computer for five days, but it could have been much worse. This virus was not messing around, either. It had Task Manager disabled right away so that I couldn't find the process and it started attempting to install all sorts of evil things on my machine, which were all blocked by my anti-spyware programs. When I saw my machine open up the My Documents folder, I knew there was trouble and hit the off button on my power supply as fast as I could get to it. It doesn't look like anything has been hacked yet and all my money is still in my poker accounts, so I guess I got off easy.

In order to make sure it doesn't happen again if I can avoid it and to curtail the damage if it does happen, I've compiled a list of safeguards to help protect your computer and data.

1. Get anti-virus software and keep it completely up to date. I nearly lost everything because my anti-virus program had stopped updating and was unprepared when the virus got into my machine. Don't mess around with something that might save you a few bucks. Get good software that is guaranteed and updates itself with new definitions every day. It's easy to get lazy about this because you may think you can only get a virus if you go to a questionable site, allow something to be installed, or open an e-mail attachment, but I got this virus while Google was the only thing open on my machine. The virus can come from a server that your computer is using or from the site itself. No website is immune, so be well-prepared.

2. Use anti-spyware software as well. I like Spybot Seek and Destroy because it runs quickly, updates itself automatically, and it's free. Run the full sweep to get rid of annoying spyware and malicious programs every week or so and use the "immunize" function.

3. Back everything up. You don't realize how much important data is on your machine until you lose it. I would have lost over 100,000 words of original writing, a database of over four million hands in Holdem Manager, and a number of live poker training videos that could never be replaced. Music files, program installations, and backups of everything that I have online would all have been lost. What a mess. You can buy an external hard drive for less than $100 that automatically backs up your files every day and holds 500 GB of information. $100 is a steal for the safety of your information and they are very simple to set up and use.

4. If the worst does happen, shut off the machine as soon as possible and take it to a repair shop. Let an expert deal with it. With a malicious virus, this may mean pulling the plug or switching off its power strip. While you try to decide what to do, it may be erasing your hard drive or copying password files and sending them to a hacker. That possibility leads us to...

5. Immediately get to another computer and change all of the passwords you have used on the infected machine. If you have trouble remembering them, get yourself a $10 flash drive at Office Max and store them in an encrypted form. You may not have seen your computer sending information to anyone, but a clever hacker can conceal that process very well. Assume the worst and protect yourself.

6. Never use the same passwords on low security websites that you use on your poker or e-mail accounts. If someone hacks the almost non-existent security at awesome-poker-tips.com and gets a bunch of passwords, what do you think they are going to do with them? They are going to go right to Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars because some of them are going to match up. You don't want to be one of those people who has their account emptied and can't figure out how someone got access to your user name and password. If they can get access to your e-mail account, they can reset your password as well, so safeguard that just as carefully.

7. Never keep large sums of cash online. I keep less than 10% of my bankroll online to prevent a huge theft if someone manages to get in. Get yourself an Orange account at INGDirect.com and you can transfer money back and forth easily online and you have a much more secure place to put it that has FDIC insurance and even earns interest at a much higher interest rate than your local bank. My local banks are offering less than 1% right now, while ING is paying me 2.6% on any balance.

8. If you are really serious about online poker, dedicate a machine to it. You can buy a switch that will flip your keyboard and monitor from one computer to another with a simple combination of keystrokes or press of a button for less than $30. You can also buy a desktop PC that will run online poker applications quite nicely for between $500 and $800. I like TigerDirect.com for fast systems at very reasonable prices. If the computer you use to access your e-mail and surf the web has never seen your online poker passwords, then it can't divulge those secrets when a clever hacker or mean virus gets access to it. My poker machine is not even able to access the internet when I am not using it, so I know my accounts are much safer than they once were.