Speaking ahead of the 15th anniversary of the day the web's code was put into the public domain, the web's inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, stated, “ the world wide web is "still in its infancy". (End quote)

Cyberthreats, cybercrime, cyberterrorists, cyberattacks. How about data mining, data theft, data monitoring. Add malware, rootkit, keylogger, spam. Seven out of eight dictionaries I checked still describe Trojan: A native or inhabitant of ancient Troy.

Many dictionaries fail to included this terminology in the rank and file of common words. Commentators struggle to coin the phrase that will adequately describes the newest threat. The reality of the world we live in.

Experts at McAfee warned a little over a week ago that malware creators were hacking into pro-Tibet Web sites and infecting them with malware that could then be injected into site visitors' PCs.

A tech paper headlines stated that threat against Internet Explorer fell last month. But the body of the text stated that Mozilla Firefox was drawing fire and that the threats to this browser, substantially increased.

While the following list of suggestions is not by any means intended to be the beginning and end of Internet security, it may raise your awareness of some places to start.( I focus on the free ones)

Firewall

To keep the sensitive data from your hard drives from roaming on the web, its essential.

For Windows XP, the Windows Firewall is not good enough. ARA recommend using Comodo Firewall Pro Free instead. First introduced as a part of Service Pack 2, XP's firewall is not capable of blocking outbound connections. This is the number one reason for using a software firewall, as a router (also known as a hardware firewall) takes care of inbound connections perfectly.

For Windows Vista, Microsoft addressed this problem; spyware and viruses that "phoned home" with stolen information would be caught by Vista's firewall. If you have Windows Vista, there is no need for Comodo or any third-party firewall. Regardless of whether you're on XP or Vista, a router is essential. We would even go as far as saying that a hardware firewall is more important than having a software firewall enabled—regardless of which OS you're running.

Anti-virus

The must of security application. If you insist on not shelling out a dime: Antivir, Avast, or AVG.

The choice between the three comes down to user preference: download and install them one by one (never, under any circumstances, have more than one anti-virus program installed on your computer) .

Anti-spyware and Anti-adware

Thanks to Microsoft's acquisition of GIANT Company Software in December 2004, the software maker now has an anti-spyware offering available for Windows XP, and comes included with Windows Vista.

Windows Defender, while a very solid application, may be better than Spybot but it is still not quite there yet. Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free is the freeware application ARA recommend, but they do not suggest disabling Windows Defender; use them together.

Encryption

Despite the Supreme Court ruling that border guards can copy your hard drive, they never ruled you had to make it easy for them. Password-protection is a possibility, but passwords can be cracked too easily in this day and age. Give a 13-year-old the right program, and weep as he breaks into your p0rn stash and locks you out of it. For all your privacy needs, encryption is the way to go. TrueCrypt is an application that offers on-the-fly encryption with minimal user intervention. It is the best that is out there right now, and it's entirely free. Furthermore, TrueCrypt is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Linux

Snort is an open-source intrusion prevent and detection system that performs real-time traffic analysis and can block attacks from a number of different vectors. Snort is often used in conjunction with the Basic Analysis and Security Engine (BASE), which provides a web-based visual interface for viewing Snort logs and notifications.

Wireshark is a popular packet-sniffing and protocol analysis tool that uses PCAP to intercept data that is being transmitted over a network. Users can filter the data with regular expressions or other parameters and view the data in a simple color-coded grid.

AppArmor is an open-source framework for Linux that reduces the potential for exploitation by instituting the principle of least privilege. It is much easier to configure than SELinux and is also less resource-intensive. It is tightly integrated in openSUSE and is being adopted by Ubuntu and other popular distributions.

Nmap is an open-source port scanner and network analysis tool that is lightweight and easy to use. It is particularly useful for security auditing and detecting running services on a network. A relatively new graphical front-end called Zenmap includes a command wizard that will help novice users put together nmap commands.

Netcat, which is described by its developers as the TCIP/IP Swiss Army knife, is a powerful tool for reading and writing network data. Netcat is extremely versatile and can be used for a wide variety of things including port scans, file transfers, and for interacting with remote network services from the command line. There is also an improved, more modern version called socat

So you've done your homework and built your great wall against China. What if you still become a victim. I got the answer for that also. The Internet Crime Complaint Center

File your complaint here so the FBI can interrogate the cybercriminal with all them newly approved interrogation methods that Justice Scalia says “are not torture because, they are not punishing the person”

That is, if they can find the person :>)