My "Home Computer Security Baseline"

What on earth is a home computer security baseline?

Complex or difficult tasks are best completed with a checklist or procedure of some sort. The children's riddle "how do you eat an elephant" seems to fit here. The answer, of course, is "one bite at a time". Computer Security is just such a task.

I am not the first person to create a security baseline to follow, but I think you will find mine to be more extensive than most. And mine is tailored to the home PC user - hence "Home Computer Security Baseline". Some of the items in the baseline are hardware, some software, some configuration directives and others guide user behavior. And, believe it or not, the user component may just be the most important.

The Computer Security industry makes a lot of noise about which product can clean up the most. I find that once a computer has been thoroughly infected, cleanup is time consuming and frustrating at best. At worst, a reinstall of the operating system may be required - ugh!.

The whole point of the Home Computer Security Baseline is to prevent infection in the first place!

The key here is that PC's (and users) adhering to my Home Computer Security Baseline don't need cleaning up. This is important because a computer that is massively infected, even when cleaned professionally, still isn't what it used to be. There is almost always garbage left behind that no one or no program can really know for sure to find and delete. The more that's laying around on your hard drive, or in the Windows registry, the more drag on your system.

"Can't I just read PC-Whatever magazine to see what to buy?"

Often I am asked about this product or that product because someone saw a show on TV or read a review in a magazine. They tell me that the product in question ranks #1, and want to know why I'm not using it.

Products you see recommended on these pages don't always rate #1 in all the reviews all of the time. No product does. Sometimes competing products will continually be leapfrogging each other.

There are products out there that always rate highly in reviews but have a history of giving me problems. Those I avoid no matter what some reviewer says about it. (Some reviewers have conflicts of interest - surprise, surprise.)

In fact, years ago in the computer business, there was a saying "no one ever got fired recommending IBM". That meant that a corporate IT person who recommended something other than IBM better be ready to defend his/her recommendation. IBM had such a name and presence that they were assumed to be the best choice, whether they actually were or not. IBM greatly profited from that.

Many companies, however, bought a product that was not only overpriced, but in some cases inferior to competing products.

This thinking unfortunately exists today with Home Computer Security products.

What's important to you is that the products I choose to recommend have to meet my stringent criteria:

consistently rank high in competent reviews (but not necessarily #1)
not hog too many system resources, bogging the machine down - the sole purpose of the PC is for you to use it, not the security product!
must play well with others
be relatively easy to install, configure and use
be reasonably priced, including discounts for renewals
have a success rate in my consulting business

So let's look at the steps involved, in my Home Computer Security Baseline:

At first this list can look rather daunting, I know. But just like eating an elephant, take it one bite at a time. Remember, if this list looks long, it's nothing compared to rebuilding your entire computer after a hacker or some malware have had at it!

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