TruthScape.com  9  The Truth About RuneScape Account and Password Scamming and “Hacking”       9  How to Improve Your Account Security

Set Appropriate Recovery Question Answers Ensure That Your Operating System and Browser are Up-to-Date

You may have heard of firewalls in the context of computer systems. These are named after firewalls in buildings, which are designed to slow the spread of fire from one floor or section of the building to another. In computers, a firewall serves the same basic purpose: it prevents unwanted message traffic from passing from one network to another.

From the standpoint of a typical Internet user—and RuneScape player—a firewall is most important because of its ability to prevent two types of unwanted network behavior. First, it can stop unauthorized users (hackers) from accessing your computer from other machines on the Internet. Second, if you do get a piece of malicious software, like a keylogger, a firewall may prevent that program from “phoning home”; that is, sending information about you or your system to someone else.

I consider the use of a firewall to be mandatory if you care at all about the security of your system. That's especially true if you have an “always on” Internet connection - using one without a firewall puts you at serious risk of a security problem. While you probably won't actually get someone trying to hack your system as a result of what you do within RuneScape itself, it is unwise to use the Internet without a firewall in place.

There are two basic types of firewalls you can choose from:

• Hardware Firewalls: These are an actual physical devices that sits between your computer and your Internet connection. You usually configure a hardware firewall with a Web browser, telling it what traffic to permit through the firewall and what to block.
  
  
• Software Firewalls: These are programs that run on your PC. A software firewall intercepts messages coming from and going to your Internet connection, and decides whether to block those messages or pass them along based on instructions you provide.

Neither is better or worse than the other; they have trade-offs. A hardware firewall is technically considered more secure, but it's an extra device that you need to buy, power, install and manage. A software firewall is cheaper and there are even free ones, but they use up some computing resources, and in some cases can cause compatibility problems with other software.

For individual users, buying a separate hardware firewall is usually not necessary. However, if you have a router, either for a local area network or to run a wireless network for mobile devices, it may already have firewall capabilities built in—like the Linksys wireless router shown in Figure 115. If you want to go the software route, I recommend ZoneAlarm: it comes in both a free version and pay versions if you need more features.

Figure 115: Hardware Router with Firewall Capabilities

Many modern wired and wireless routers include basic firewall capabilities, like this Linksys WRT150N.

Set Appropriate Recovery Question Answers Ensure That Your Operating System and Browser are Up-to-Date

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Last Update: May 28, 2008

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