Today, there are many threats present on the Internet that could damage your computer system and could steal and abuse your personal information. With ever more viruses, Trojans, and various other threats appearing, the Internet it is becoming a very volatile and unpredictable. Simple antivirus products may not be enough to maximise your protection. It is not just viruses that pose a threat; hackers also cause lots of trouble for Internet users. There are steps that you can take like using a proxy website that will allow you to remain more safe online while your surf and will hopefully minimise any chance of your personal data being stolen.

The first thing you should make sure you do is to ensure the installation of a good, effective antivirus product on your computer or network. Always do your homework before parting with any cash though. Look on forums, newsgroups, yahoo answers and various other sites and you should soon be able to get an idea on whether a product is worth buying or not. Once you have purchased a good antivirus products make sure you get regular updates on it. When you connect to the Internet the updates may happen automatically, though with some products will require some manual input to get the updates installed. Updates once a month or even once a week is not good enough with all the threats on the Internet. Ideally, you should be looking at getting updates for your product twice or three times every week.

Having a good antivirus product installed with regular updates should give you some fairly good protection. If you want to remain more private when you browse then you should use a proxy website. There are many available on the Internet and you should have no problem finding one via Google or Yahoo. The proxy will act as an intermediary between your computer and the Internet and will handle all data requests that you make for you. This means that websites that you visit will not be able to trace you but will only be able to log the proxy details like its IP address etc.

You could try visiting a ninja proxy for some good reviews on some products and to find a good proxy for you to use. There are many out there so you may have to do some careful research before just using any old one you come across. If you can afford it, and want to take Internet privacy and protection to a whole new level then you could invest some money in a product that offers encryption as a feature. This will keep prying eyes away from your Internet activities and will keep them as private as private can be.

To summarise, if you want to maximise your protection from threats online then you should

1) Make sure you have a good antivirus product installed

2) Make sure you use a reliable proxy website. A ninja proxy is a good one to look at

3) Ideally, find a product which allows you to encrypt all of your Internet data so that it can be kept completely private and safe.

A secure proxy is basically a middle man that receives requests intended for another computer and therefore acts on behalf of another. A proxy service is used often when a client computer on network is incompatible for a direct connection. One example would be the client being unable to meet security requirements of the server but may need to access certain services.

It may also be used for screening purposes to allow the administrator to control access to unwanted or undesirable sites. A proxy server may also be used for caching purposes which enables faster access to frequently used sites. All computers connected to a LAN access the Internet via single IP address which results in improved security simply because the number of ports exposed is less than they would have been otherwise.

Proxy servers work on the seventh layer of the OSI model; the application layer. It tends to be application dependant unlike firewalls that work differently on lower layers. They are not as easy to install either and are often more difficult than to maintain than firewalls because proxy functionality for each application is protocol like HTTP, SMTP or SOCKS must be configured one at a time.

However, a properly configured secure proxy server will improve security and performance. As proxy servers function at the OSI application layer, their filtering capabilities are relatively intelligent. For example, proxy web servers can check the URL address of outgoing requests for web pages by inspecting HTTP GET and POST messages.

By using this function, network administrators can bar access to certain sites but can allows access to others. Normal firewalls cannot see web domain names inside those messages. Likewise for incoming data, ordinary routers can filter by port number or network address, but proxy servers can also filter based on application content inside the messages. There are many popular proxy servers available for Windows.

WinProxy is widely used. One of the reasons for this is that no software has to be installed on the client computers. This means that it is more efficient and it can be setup alot quicker. This is possible because WinPorxy is a transparent proxy server meaning that it can also provide NAT. Because of this the client computer is practically unaware of the proxy servers existence. Apart from the usual caching and security features it also supports important protocols like HTTP, FTP, NNTP and lots of others.

A WinProxy server can be setup and configured by following the steps below.

1. Install the TCP/IP protocol on all computers that are connected to the network

2. Run the Installation wizard and follow it through. You will need your product key

3. The following screens require information about your Internet connection. Select the type of connection and name it

4. Now enter the username and password for your connection

5. Your external and internal IP address is then configured. It automatically assigns a unique address to each device connected on the LAN

6. You then should disconnect from the Internet if you are connected at this stage

7. In the final step, WinProxy works through all the steps and will confirm that all operations have been executed successfully

8. The secure proxy should now be fully functional to use