For many a system is a hub of significant documents, files, and applications, but there is always a risk of losing the important files because of outside threat. Outside threats have become a big concern for all users, especially those who use the internet regularly. Starting from damage to your system to cyber crime like identity theft, outside threats pose many dangers to your system. However, the silver lining to this concern is the presence of ways to protect and guard your system from these threats. You do not need to be a computer wizard to do this, as you just have to follow some simple steps.

Steps to take for data protection

When it comes to computer security, you have to look after many aspects such as risk analysis, kinds of threats, security policy, and then come protection techniques. Viruses, keylogging, worms and pishing attacks are all around your system to damage it, but there are ways through which you can assure the security of your system. The main ways of computer security includes:

• Antivirus programs, which can scan and keeps you alert about viruses
• Firewall of your system, which can be configured for enabling you to transfer selected information between your system and internet.
• Backup is another way of protecting your important files and documents, as this helps to restore lost files because of virus attack.

Things to remember

Apart from the main security options for your data, there are some more points that you should keep in mind. These are as follows:

• Indentify the symptoms of threats, so that you can take proper measures to tackle them
• Keep the virus database of your antivirus program updated
• Scan your system once in a week, to look out for new bugs
• Be alert of emails that ask for personal information
• Scan USB devices that you use for transferring data
• Keep your web browser and OS up to date

Different security levels

Remember to make use of share-level and file-level security and set permissions on folders and data files in your system. In case, you share your system with someone else, it is better to utilize file-level permissions. Some applications allow you to set password for individual documents. EFS encryption is another way of protecting your system data, and doing this is also very easy, as you just have to select a check box for enabling this protection.

Use of encryption

A few of the third-party applications also enable you to encrypt the entire disk of your system. This sort of encryption locks down whole documents in a partition or disk drive. If you are a frequent internet user and transfer your data over the internet often, then you can opt for IP security. However, this will help only if both the receiving and sending systems supports such security. Protection of data send over wireless networks is even more important, because such data is more vulnerable to hacking or pishing, so you should use networks, which utilize encryption.