Keeping safe online
Friday, 17 August 2007
Ok I apologise for the cheesy title but it’s all that I could think of 🙂 a mate of mine asked me to do a post on how to protect your browser when you’re online so here goes. First off it’s impossible. That’s right impossible, you can’t make your browser 100% secure, all you can do is reduce your chances of being exploited.
The best way of reducing your chances is to use an obscure browser or lockdown your settings. For example turn off javascript and plugins, I can hear you in the background no way! I can’t browse the web like that! You’re right it’s pretty impossible to do that. So the solution? Use noscript [1] and Firefox [2]. Noscript allows you to selectively choose which sites you allow javascript, flash etc and you can have trusted and untrusted sites. This will improve your security no end and provide you with a safer browsing experience.
You can also customise noscript (which I recommend) simply left click on the “S” icon on the bottom right of Firefox and select options, under the appearance tab UNCHECK “Allow scripts globally” option and check that XSS protection is enabled under the advanced tab also check that Forbid Flash, Forbid Java etc is CHECKED under the untrusted tab.
If you’ve followed those steps every site you now visit will be locked down and you have to manually trust each site you visit by clicking the “S” icon and selecting trust this site.