Royal Baby Pics May Come With Malware! -By Kevin Judge

People love baby pictures. Now that the Kate Middleton, aka the Duchess of Cambridge has given birth to a royal heir you can bet that the next great surge in Internet traffic will be when baby pictures are released or leaked. In fact, it could be almost as much traffic as when pictures of Kate in HER birthday suit were circulated around the internet last year.

However, before you click on a link to download images of the little royal you better be careful. You could get a royal pain instead. Hackers and criminals will certainly be setting up fake download sites to trick you into retrieving malware. They do it all the time, but they just love an event like this. They figure that you will be so eager to see the next generation of the House of Windsor that you won't stop and think before you act.

When you do you could download a virus, exploit or other malware that could harm your computer or enlist it in nefarious activities. Worse, you are endangering other users who you come in contact with.

There are so many threats that it is hard to keep track of them all. In fact, there are 50,000 new malware unleashed on the world each day. You could download malware that destroys your files, enlist your computer in a network sending spam or capture your personal information for a financial scam just to name a few possibilities

What can you do?

First of all, use an internet security suite that uses sandboxing and a whitelist to ensure that only safe programs are run by the system. A sandbox is a virtual operting system where you can run programs safely, even if they turn out to be malicious.

Antivirus systems use a so called "blacklist" of known harmful programs. The best systems also use a "whitelist" of known safe programs that you can trust.

If there is any doubt about the safety of a program, it is run it in the sandbox. It is a safe, secure area called the sandbox. No matter what, your system is safe.

Unfortunately, you could still be endangering others. If you download an unsafe file to a network drive or a USB you could end up spreading it. If the file is a trojan, a program pretending to be something it is not, a sandbox will protect you but you might unwittingly forward it to others.

That's why you need to use a web browser with enhanced security functionality. For example, the Dragon browser is a Chromium technology-based Browser that offers you all of Chrome's features plus unique security and privacy protection. It will warn you of web sites with low levels of assurance. All digital certificates provide an encrypted connection, but some certificates offer more security than others. Domain-only certificates are available to any webmaster at low cost and with no verification, providing no guarantee of authentication.

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