How to protect yourself!

I'd like to give you some of my advices how to protect yourself against cheaters, script-kiddies and wannabe hackers.


1. Always have an anti-virus program installed. It's one of your computer's best friend.

Good antiviruses:
* Norton Antivirus = Good antivirus, eats your CPU!
* NOD 32 = Good for all gamers. Low CPU.
* Kaspersky Antivirus = Also a good antivirus. Mid-CPU!


2. Another good friend to your computer is definitly a firewall. This is how you protect yourself against hackattempts and exploits. I'd recommend:

* Norton Personal Firewall 2004 = MID CPU, takes much.
Don't use ZoneAlarm. It'll eat your bandwidth to a 50%. Sure it's a good firewall but 50%. It's a software bug in every version.


3. Install a good spyware, bot, adware, malware remover. I'd recommend:

* Spyboy search & destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html


4. Don't give your accountinformation to anyone. NEVER!
NCSOFT & Arenanet will NEVER ask for your account & password.
There may be scammers like; [email protected]
I'd say LOL! Why would NCSoft use hotmail?


5. Beware of scammers. Let's say you want to trade yourself a good bow. Your victim puts the bow and then cancel the trade. You start your trade again and see it's the same picture as the same bow you saw previously, and accepting the trade. Guess what ? You just got ripped off. Always put your cursor on the item/s you're trading. A good example of this was the "RED DYE and DYE REMOVER"
When the game got released, these 2 items looked the same. So people were scamming all over Tyria :P


6. If anyone wants to give you 120k for your Superior Vigor for example, you know it's fake. Since your character cannot carry more than 100k. He just saved 20k.

This will be updated. Hopefully this will be sticky. Gotta sleep

3. Don't just use one adware remover, non of them takes care of everything.
Adaware SE Personal: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
MS Anti Spyware Beta (former Giant Antis Spyware): http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...e/default.mspx
Hijackthis (registry checker): http://www.download.com/HijackThis/3...-10227353.html
CCleaner (crap cleaner): http://www.ccleaner.com/

6. If trading for over 100p take items for the value over 100p so you can trade in one session.

Ok, a lot of good in that post. But not use ZoneAlarm? Its one of the best fire walls on the market, even the free version works extremely well (in fact better than ones like BlackIce which you have to pay for). 50%? It takes no where near that amount, at least for me, not even close - and my pc barely meets the requirements for Guild Wars. http://www.zonelabs.com/store/conten...eeDownload.jsp

Also, only recommending one spy ware program? No one spyware program finds all the pieces of spyware. I presonally use Spybot S&D, AdAware and Microsoft Anti spyware.

Also another decent anti-virus program is AVG. It isn't perfect, but if you aren't willing to pay for one, this one works very well for a free anti virus. http://www.grisoft.com/

I also like The Cleaner http://www.moosoft.com/ to scan for trojans and to monitor the registry and processes. It beep everytime something changed into your registry and give you the option to ignore or edit the change.

Also in game if someone ask you for your email, don't give him the one you use to login.. He would be half way to stealing your account by having only the password to guess.. Even tho password is the hardest to figure out, i wouldn't take the chance.

Don't make your password simple words such as "mypassword". Use something that mean nothing with a mix of letters and numbers such as "oa7y54n749cn"
I've read somewhere that the best way to make up a password was to get a squirel to run on your keyboard

If you note your password down, write it down on a good old paper that you can keep safe.. If you note them in a Notepad, anyone conected to your computer with a trojan coud easily find it.

Recently i had someone wanting to join my guild.. He was named Brutus Hack. I didn't let him join only because "Brutus" is an old brute force program to steal passwords and "Hack" is pretty obvious to everyone i guess.. So don't let people with such names into your guild or friends.

Better safe than sorry!

thx for this info, ill instal this when im home and got the time

I personally only use the following: -

Firewall: Microsoft Windows XP built-in firewall (SP2).
Antivirus: None at the moment, but when I do it's Sophos.
Spyware: Spybot Search & Destroy and Hijackthis.

Of course, I know what I'm doing and I clean out and/or reformat my system often so security isn't a very high priority for me. But most of the above suggestions in this thread are great for the average user.

As for this little debate about ZoneAlarm, I wouldn't wipe my bottom with it. It's a horrible firewall, even worse than the XP SP0 firewall in my opinion.

I used to like ZoneAlarm because it's easy to configure, but I have to agree it's the software firewall with the most bugs too. I don't think any other firewall has as many issues and incompatibilities as ZA.

One thing to add: those of you with broadband access, consider a switching router, aka a hardware firewall. That will protect your computer from intrusion as well as anything can, while the main purpose of software firewalls like ZA or Norton Internet firewall is to let you keep tabs on outgoing communications.

(Also, for those of us with better than 5MBit connections, do NOT get a D-Link router, as all their routers have a top transfer rate over WAN of 5MBit half duplex! Pretty much all other brands, e.g. ZyXel, Cisco, 3Com... will be OK, though.)

just like to add , i use nod32 and there are some issues with this ( and probably others) when running gw.
if you have nod32 enabled gw will not launch. you will need to exclude the gw.exe from the nod32 AMON.
if the problem still arises you may also need to configure the IMON as well, its a real pain.
also when using a router make sure you have the neccesary ports open , namely 80 and tcp port 6112. hope this helps a little

Holy Thread Ressurection.....back To The Grave With Ye!

If you want good overall protection I suggest using the Kaspersky Internet Security. It's an all-in one program which contains anti-virus protection and a firewall, propably the best thing in the package. Works great and it's not annoying as Norton is. On top of that, using Kaspersky is a pleasure for me. I never liked clumsy AV programs but once I started using Kaspersky I changed my mind - can't live without it now.

And to all Windows Firewall users - Update your firewall now! Using Windows firewall is almost as if you had no protection at all. One of it's main problems is that it only analyzes the incoming data but not the outgoing. Pure crap, at least they updated the Vista firewall so it works both ways but it's still not as good as it could be. You will still need a professional solution for that. On top of my head I can suggest earlier mentioned Kaspersky which is really great and I recommend it or maybe Kerio which is good too.

Also don't forget about Spybot, it's the first thing you should be using after you have a good firewall and an AV installed. Other anty-spyware programs are good too, even Spybot and Kaspersky together won't be able to clean up everything but they can still get rid of most it for good.

Edit: Wow a 2 years ressurection! Didn't notice that.. Good thing that the topic isn't really outdated yet. Still good to read.

Use an alternative browser such as Firefox or Opera instead of Internet Explorer for your surfing. Since IE is used by the majority of computer users, it's also the no 1 target as well for spyware and virus writers. I use Firefox with the NoScript addon to stop nasty little scripts running

Why Are We Reading This In A Goddamn Guild Wars Forum? Good God!

That's actually the best advice at all, I've been running FF with scribt block for ages now, never had a virus since i started using that.

A good free firewall.? any ideas? not too aggressive please?

because some people cares about their accounts' security ergo their pc's security

If I'm a moderator, I would move this to the tech forum and add sticky to it

Funny, I've been runnign IE for years virus free...

Congratulations, you are in the minority.

I use both I use IE for downloading and just FF for browsing I use a pop up blocker on my IE with Yahoo toolbar.I do trend micro scans online once in awhile.

I also have not had any problems with IE as far as virus goes. I run AVG and Zonealarm. Both are doing a good job. I also run trojan checking software periodically as anti-virus doesn't catch those.

In addition, I don't open messages from people I don't know or click on links in email or browse amateur websites.

Also be careful when setting up your firewall. Most programs on your computer DO NOT need access to the internet. You can do manual updates when required.

Virus free maybe, but have you checked for any deeply embedded spy/malware recently?

I use Firefox, run Sygate Firewall, have AVG, Spyware Blaster, Spyware Blocker, and Ad-aware.

Zonealarm, Avast and Spybot - S&D.

Most importantly use Mozilla Firefox for extra security.