Security Concerns

The Internet is not a very safe environment. Most computer crimes are carried out using false identity online. For this reason, the owner of the ILS account is obligated to keep username and password within the household.

Your Home Network router's wireless service should have a private keyphrase (password). Computer criminals are looking for open wireless networks to conduct their business under somebody else's identity. The owner of the account if responsible of all behaviour and transactions made through the account.

If you even suspect that somebody may be remotely connected to your home network or has your password:
- disable your router's wireless connection, call ILS immediately to have your password changed.

Another common method of gaining your identity and contents of your computer is exporting a trojan (malicious program) inside an email attachment into your system. Use extreme care in handling attachments.

If you get a mail message that you did not expect, it has an attachment or strange links, delete it without opening any files.

Don't be a target

A computer idling on the Internet is a world wide target for hackers who want to practice their skills. Especially, if the computer advertises its existance by regularly pinging or mail-checking an outside server, the hacker is invited to start port scanning, IP spoofing, mail port sniffing, flood pinging and other nasty tricks.

Virus Protection

Everybody who connects to the Internet with Microsoft Windows operating systems should have an anti-virus scanner installed. These are typically shareware programs available for free 30-day period and registered for modest cost.

The late versions of virus scanners are meant for high speed connections and take huge amounts of bandwidth to upgrade their databases and are not suitable for dialup use. These programs are very heavy on computers, require lots of RAM and CPU speed and slow down even the fastest machine.

Good working light Virus scanners are Microsoft's new and free MSE, Microsoft Security Essentials (search with Google) and free version of Avast. We recommend these one for dialup users and those you decide that they don't need massive protection packages and prefer more system and network speed. Mac and Linux users don't need virus scanners.

Note that virus scanners need to be updated regularly. However, unless you download and install new programs all the time, it may not be necessary to run a Virus scanner constantly taking memory and other resources. Always download your files into the one folder (directory), and scan this folder as soon as you added something there.
Don't overestimate the capabilities of Virus scanners. It does not know what the is coming in the mail tomorrow. Also, virus scanner cannot protect the machine against user stupidity; whoever is on the keyboard can delete and modify files at will.