A recent round of PayPal phishing schemes brings up the importance of staying diligent and alert when responding to email. To sharpen your phishing sensors, PayPal offers a Fight Phishing Challenge . Common Crafts explains Phishing Scams in Plain English. And Wombat Security Technologies offers an educational Anti-Phishing Phil game based work done at Carnegie-Mellon.

When choosing an anti-virus program for Windows, the independent Virus Bulletin’s testing and review program provides invaluable information about which programs pass muster. The top 100 antivirus programs (along with those that didn’t make it) are found in this VB100 summary ( . To view the test results, you will need to register. Registration is free.

OnGuardOnline.gov is a federal website with practical tips on securing your computer and guarding against Internet fraud. Information is delivered with videos, tutorials, and games designed to test and expand your knowledge. Topics include laptop security, social networking, malware, identity theft and much more.

The best defense against spoof (fake or phishing) emails is to be educated and informed about how to spot them. eBay has a good tutorial on how to protect yourself, as does Stop-Phishing.com from the University of Indiana. Number one tip: when visiting a site in response to an email that asks for some web action, do not click on the link in the email. Instead, navigate to the company site independently, either by looking it up in a search engine, or getting the URL off a billing statement.

Ever wondered why your Internet connection is busy while you are not doing anything on your computer? It could be a dozen benign reasons (such as an email program checking for email) or it could be malware. Netstat is a free program included with most versions of Windows and Unix that displays all open Internet connections. To learn more, read Use Netstat to Track IPs or How Can I Tell What Internet Activity is Happening On My Machine?.

Cookies are small text files saved on your computer by websites. Some are used to remember your website preferences (such as your login username, or local zipcode for weather or movie listings.) Others are used to track your surf patterns between websites. These are also known as “tracking cookies” or “spyware cookies.” When choosing a spyware program, find out if it detects and removes tracking cookies. For more, read Walt Mossberg.

When spyware takes control of your browser by changing the start page and the default search engine, it is called a browser hijacking. To thwart most hijacking attempts, many experts advocate using Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. If you are already are infected, HiJack This is a free tool that will list all your browser plug-ins. Learn more browser hijacking at Spyware.info.

Mischievous websites and spyware programs often open program windows that do not include the usual X button to close them. Rather than being tricked into clicking in the program window, Windows users can use Alt-F4 to close the current window. The Alt-F4 trick can also be used to close errant programs that are not responding to other mouse clicks.

If you and your computer are suffering from an endless stream of pop-ups, the culprit may be spyware, software inadvertently installed on your computer that watches what you do, where you go, and serves up ads based on your actions. Spybot Search & Destroy is a free Windows tool that will disinfect your machine. More information about spyware can be found at Spyware Info/