How to Check Your Online Security

Don Bradbury takes you through some options

Whatever security you have set up on your computer, leaks may be present of which you are presently unaware. The Gibson Research organisation located at www.grc.com offers a secure site that lets you test your PC directly, with tests from it's ShieldsUP! link.

Go online, load the Gibson Research website, and scroll down the second page until you reach ShieldsUP. There you will find a range of facilities that can be tested. Selecting each of these gives you reports on aspects of your system that you may find useful.

For example, if you let the All Service Ports option loose on your system, it will probe for and report on any security leaks - should they be present - and let you think again about how you have your system set up.

ShieldsUP text report

After a confirmatory run with our firewall switch on, we disabled the firewall to let ShieldsUP report a few "holes" it could then spot, indicated by the red squares among the safe blue ones. Without disabling the firewall, ShieldsUP had found no security leaks whatsoever, which was rather boring to see in print! With security holes present, you should see a report such as that shown below, in part, after a short period of probing, complete with a report on your IP address as a header.

ShieldsUP graphic report

If you prefer a text report that you can print and take away, that's available, too. It's in the form we show below, but of course the outcome will differ depending on your setup.

To be safe while connected to the Internet, you should have a system reporting no security leaks at all. Should leaks be present, there is no way you can be sure that hackers and other malicious predators are not probing your computer for goodness knows what information, not to mention the possibility of popping malware on your system, whenever you connect with the Internet.

Additional services

You can also probe particular ports on your computer from this site. The port number and specific application are reported, along with other useful information.

The Gibson Research website offers a range of additional services. For example, there's a whole array of freebie software you can download that you might find useful. But the main function of the site is to guide you through the security implications of the way you have your system presently set up, and for this, ShieldsUP is quite comprehensive.

In conclusion

Well worth a test run, and the peace of mind it can give you when a clean bill of security health is reported.

 

Don Bradbury