Identity Theft and Phishing is rampant these days! I’m sure you’ve received numerous emails from your long lost deceased Uncle Bob’s attorney who just happens to be managing the distribution of his estate and wants to send you 3.4 million dollars.

These days its important to be watching out for more than just suspicious emails. Because your computer most likely contains information such as passwords, banking account information, birthdays, etc. you should protect all access to your computer as well. You need to “harden” your operating system. Putting your operating system (Linux, Windows, etc.) through the school of hard knocks will ensure that it is closed to unauthorized access.

Completing a Google search for “windows xp hardening tips” turns up close to 1 million results. There are a ton of great solutions to harden (increase security) for your operating system. As I use Windows XP and Ubuntu the below tips are most relevant to users of those operating systems, though there is a lot of overlap from one operating system to another. While there is a plethora of different techniques, I’ve found that the following five techniques provides enough security to protect the average users computer. If you are hosting top level government secrets on your computer you’ll probably need to implement some extra security steps, but for the average home/business computer user these five steps will secure your computer sufficiently.

1. Always use a NON-ADMINISTRATOR account. Your computer will allow you to make a whole slew of extra security errors if you are logged in as an administrator. Change the administrator account so that the password is extra difficult and also ensure that the account is not named “administrator” or “admin”. Only use this account for necessary installation, etc. and then log back into a non-administrator account immediately thereafter.
2. Ensure strong password compliance. Use only passwords that are rated “100%” by The Password Meter in their password strength checker (http://www.passwordmeter.com/). To achieve this level of strength your password will most likely need to be 14 characters or longer and contain upper and lower case letters, numbers, symbols and be well mixed with a variety of each.
3. Disable boot by CD/USB/Removable Drive in BIOS and password protect BIOS.

· One of the most simple methods to steal information from a computer that has password protection on the operating system is to bypass the installed operating system altogether. This can be easily performed by putting a “live operating system” on a USB or CD and then placing/plugging in this to the computer when starting up the computer. This makes it so the “live operating system” on the disc/usb is booted up and no password will be required to access the information stored in your computers hard drive.

· If you enter your BIOS/Setup when your computer is turning on you can then go into the “boot order” function and disable the option to boot off of a CD and a USB or other removable media. If you ever need to re-install your operating system you will need to come in here and turn them back on until the re-install is finished.

· Now sure you use the “password protect BIOS/Setup” option in your BIOS to put a password on the BIOS so any computer thieves cannot simply access your BIOS and turn CD/USB access back on.

1. Set your screen saver to 5 minutes and enable “on resume, password protect”. This means that if you walk away from your computer without logging out an information thief has only 5 minutes to stumble upon your computer to gain access. Even better, be absolutely perfect and always log off if you leave your computer at all.
2. Disable file and print sharing. In Windows file and print sharing is often turned on as a default. Yet, most computers running Windows are not part of a network and do not need this turned on. Ultimately, having these turned on is giving hackers a back door into your system.

If you aren’t sure how to do any of these please leave a comment and I’ll explain it to you. Heck, I might even write a blog post describing it in detail… they require a lot of little steps though so I’m not going to include it here unless you ask. Or you can do a Google search for “harden windows xp” and a number of sites will tell you how to do these basic hardeners.