Safe and Sound Home Computing

It's never too late to raise the level of cyberawareness in your home. Follow up with these best practices.

• Back up all your important digital files (e.g. finance, house, medical, family pictures) on an external hard disk.
• Do some cleaning on your hard drive; Store personal material on external devices, run anti-spyware and anti-virus software, and de-fragment your hard drive.
• Install any pending software patches you were too busy to do earlier.
• Double-check your credit card bills to see if your online shopping did not result in charges for any extra items you never purchased.
• Google yourself to see if anybody used your name inappropriately on the Internet.
• Check your privacy settings on all the social networking site profiles you have. Some of these sites change their practices and policies fairly often.
• Change the passwords that you haven't changed in the past 6 months.
• Do a complete scan of your system and external hard drives for malware.
• Recheck the firewall setting of your computer.
• Check the parental control setting on your kid's cellphone, laptop, television etc.
• Configure your wireless router to WPA2 encryption and change your key.

Now, enjoy! Be sure to repeat these steps in a few months to keep your computer and data safe and sound.