Home > My Online Security Experiment
My Online Security Experiment
By: Kenneth Echie
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In the good old days of the Internet, a firewall was something only big servers used, and antivirus was almost a toy. The threats online were minimal and if they happened to strike they were normally pretty easy to get rid of.
And so it was I wondered what it would be like today if I reduced my computer to having absolutely zero protection. You see I had just gone through a complete reformat of computer .. in other words I had reduced my computer to nothing. All my important files were sitting on DVD's waiting for a computer to put them on, and Windows XP was busy installing and the thought crossed my mind "Now is the perfect opportunity to test out what would happen if I had no protection while online.
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If anything bad happened I don't have anything on and I can just quickly reformat again and reduce it to nothing and get rid of the nastys".
So there it was. Windows XP finished installing, I setup my Internet connection and DID NOT install my firewall program or my antivirus. And I thought "Here goes!" I got online. I didn't install anything else as I thought "Whats the point, I might have to reformat everything again" but eventually got bored with freecell and decided just to put one of my games on just to pass the time.
It never got through installing. Half an hour after having gotten online with my unprotected PC, Windows popped up with an error message saying an unrecoverable error had occured and that Windows would be shutting down in 30 seconds 29 28 27 26 My first thought was that something actually had made its way on, but I thought lets give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt this time and just restart, maybe it was just an error.
After restart, within two minutes I got the same error. But this time I decided to restart my computer into Windows safe mode, which would help reduce the chance of nastys loading yet allow me to install an anti virus and scan my computer to see what was happening.
After a lengthy scan it reported to my utter surprise 378 problems. Some of the things it mentioned were malware I thought had been eradicated from the Internet years back kinda like seeing your best friend come down with small pox after it had been wiped off the planet.
Needless to say I didn't even bother letting my anti-virus have a go at cleaning my computer I just went straight into reformatting again.
So what had I learnt? Firewalls and anti-virus are not just toys to bloat your computer. They are an actual essential part of any Internet users existence online. It was kind of sad seeing the results kind of like living in a neighbourhood and seeing it go so bad you needed personal bodyguards. But at least my little experiment proved it to me once and for all. My firewall stays on, and I scan with my anti-virus every day. I would highly recommend everyone does the same. |