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Security and Privacy Links

Anyone who knows anything about security, knows to be worried. If your totem is the ostrich, and you're not interested in being worried, ignore this page! Just move on to the next link and forget you ever saw this.

Those of us who want to protect our systems from felonious intrusions, will find here links to sites with articles and tools on how to do just that.

The good news is that there are tools to protect yourself, your system and your data from unscrupulous visitors. I'll be updating this page fairly frequently, so be sure to drop by regularly.

"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

Tools

http://www.grc.com
First thing to do, of course, is check how vulnerable you are. Gibson Research, run by Steve Gibson, provides us with a number of great tools; among them the terrific (and FREE) ShieldsUp! service (yes, this is your first stop), and the SocketToMe and LeakTest utilities.

http://www.zonealarm.com
ZoneAlarm 3.0 is considered by many to be the best free firewall around. This will not only keep intruders out, but also keep your data in: if any software on your system tries to communicate with the outside world, ZoneAlarm will notify you, ask whether to block it, let it go this time, or let it go always. If you do nothing else, install ZoneAlarm.

http://www.lavasoft.com
Publishers of the very bodacious (FREE) Ad-Aware utility. This utility checks your harddrive and registry for spyware. Don't boot up without it!

http://www.cisecurity.org
Center for Internet Security. They have a set of security benchmarks, and tools to test for compliance to that benchmark, for Win2K and Solaris. Other OS benchmarks and tools are in development.

http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com
Keep your Windows OS up to date. As new vulnerabilities are exposed, Microsoft releases patches which you can automatically incorporate into your system by going to this website. Be warned, however, some of their patches actually break functionality: as it turns out, Microsoft doesn't always do such a bang up job of testing their changes. So it may be advisable to wait and see whether anyone has problems with the latest patch.

http://www.insecure.org/
Home of the free, open source Nmap (Network Mapper) tool, recently immortalized in The Matrix Reloaded. As well as the 2003 Top 75 Security Tools Survey; a comprehensive listing of tools with a dizzying array of possibilities for network protection and intrusion. Not for the faint of heart.

Information

http://www.incidents.org
Breaking security news.

http://www.sans.org
Great repository of articles on security.

http://www.practicallynetworked.com
The best place for reviews of home networking hardware. Read the reviews before you buy your router.

Privacy

http://www.epic.org
The Electronic Privacy Information Center is de rigueur if you intend to protect your privacy and your right to that privacy. It's also a great place to find out what Big Brother is planning.

http://www.eff.org
Founded by Lotus' Mitch Kapor and The Grateful Dead's lyricist, John Perry Barlow, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was created to protect civil liberties in cyberspace. They've successfully sued the US government over many of the highest profile cases, and these have radically changed the way Americans, and American government, view rights in cyberspace.

http://www.efc.ca
Electronic Frontier Canada (EFC) was founded to ensure that the principles embodied in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms remain protected as new computing, communications, and information technologies are introduced into Canadian society. The EFC frequently partners with the EFF on various cases.


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Created 1998 02 16; last modified 2006-06-14 15:19 .
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