Much like best defense practices it is best to educate yourself on just what makes a system vulnerable in order to protect against threats. 

 

It is best to perform vulnerability assessments on your system to determin just how easy it would be for an outside source to break get access to your information. There are free tools you can download like nmap to get a better picture of how secure your sytem is. A vulnerability check list can be very valuable.

 

1. Firewall

2. anti-virus

3. secured ports

4. secure passwords

5. updated software

 

Firewalls are important for ensuring security. It is important that they are set up to close off un-needed ports and protect vulnerable ones that are needed. You can check your firewall settings by going to your main menu and accessing the control panel and clicking the system security menu.

 

Anti-virus is your pre-emptive protection and last resort fix it program. You should run regular scans to ensure you aren't infected and in the case that you do become infected then you can use it to quarentine the infection. You can set your anti-virus software to scan your system in intervals based on what you believe is best for your usage. You should also make sure that your software is up to date for the best protection. You can also set it up to check for updates regularly as well from its settings menu.

 

Secured ports goes back to firewalls but you can also manually close ports. If you want you can see which ports are open/closed/protected by using software like nmap (which is free) to scan your own system. Nmap is a console based software that can scan your own ip address to determine vulnerability. Nmap provides a list of what ports it can scan and their status so you can see how secure your are. 

 

Secure passwords are important not only for your accounts online but also for user accounts on your system. It is very common for attackers to gain access to lower level accounts that aren't secure, like a guest account, and use that account to gain access to higher level account or increase account privlege in order to get more sensitive information from your system.

 

Updating your software is just as important as anything else on this list. It isn't just enough to update your anti-virus but also your OS. Many times attackers are able to find exploits in versions of popular operating systems. In order to counter this companies typically release updates that fix these exploits in update packages. So in addition to your anti-virus you should also set up your OS to update regularly. You can do this by going to your system security settings and set your update schedule to fit your usage.