PC Maintenance & Security Post

I did the Internet Security lab in my CEP 810 class.  The most useful new thing I learned was a technique called "Google Guard" for checking if an email you've received is a scam or not.  This involves using google search and inputting the address of the the mail or the url of a link included.

Using the tutorials from Atomic Learning was less productive.  While I learned some things, such as about SSID and how to disable the broadcast mode to hide your home wi-fi, since I am a Macintosh user, the Windows-oriented tutorials were not as helpful as I hoped.

First, I chose to watch J.6 & J.7, Accessing wi-fi hotspots and wireless networks.  As mentioned above, the ability to hide your home wi-fi network was a useful technique I learned about.  Nothing really surprised me in these two tutorials.

Next, I went into D.6 & D.7, tutorials on installing and using Spybot.  However, as I watched these two tutorials it started to seem pretty clear this software was only for a Windows PC.  I decided to go into their website and check, and confirmed this.  I then looked at the list of tutorials related to Blocking and Killing Spyware & Adware and went to each website of the listed software and found all of it to be related to Windows.  On one hand, that is disappointing because I would like to learn about options for my computer.  On the other hand, I know part of this is that Macs have historically been less of a target and that is part of why there is less of a market for this kind of software.  Unfortunately, "less" doesn't egual "not" and so I still want to learn how to provide more of this protection for my own computers.

Anyone have any recommendations?