Recently, many anti-scam websites have been under denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by the scammers. Believe it or not, they’re using the not-so-protected computers to perform the DDoS attack. The innocent people unknowingly help this irresponsible people to perform the attack. This computer is called ‘zombies’ and the zombies computer are computers infected by virus or trojan and used by the scammers to perform the DDoS attack.

The virus or trojan will open a backdoor on target computer for the hackers so he or she will have access to the target computer. In some cases, the hackers will sell the access to another person and that person will use the access to any purpose that the he likes. If a spammer gets access to your computer, he’ll use it to send spam emails.

The DDoS attack is perform by the scammers by sending useless data to a specific web server and when the server cannot handle the data flow, it’ll crash. This is what’s happening right now to many anti-scam websites.

This is just one thing what hackers can do when our computer is not well protected. If I’m going to list what they can do to not-so-protected computers, it will be a long list. Therefore, we need to protect our computer. But, some protection come at a high price and some are free. In this article, I will tell you where you can get good optimum computer protection without paying a dime.

1. Antivirus

Your computer needs an antivirus. A good antivirus will have real-time protection, good detection rate and it’s easy to use. If you don’t have any antivirus on your PC, get one now. Antivirus can find and remove viruses and trojan from your PC. There are three antiviruses that I personally recommend. Avast! Antivirus, AVG and Avira Antivir Personal Edition.

2. Firewall

Firewall is important so you can block ingoing or outgoing traffic. If you have malicious programs on your computer, it will not be able to send out information out from your computer and firewall will be able to block it. When you've bought a new PC, I suggest you to activate the Windows Firewall before going online. Even though the Windows Firewall cannot protect you from some malicious threats completely, but it’s good enough to protect you before you install a new firewall. After that, you need to find a good firewall and install it in your system. I personally recommend two free firewalls. Comodo Firewall Pro and ZoneAlarm.

3. Spybot Search and Destroy

Spybot Search and Destroy is good software to find spyware, malware and adware threats inside your PC. It also has some real-time protection and best of all, it’s free. It has good detection rate and can detect keyloggers inside your computer.

4. Ad-Aware 2007

Ad-Aware 2007 Free has been used by 250 million people because it provides good protection. If you have some money to spend, consider upgrading to Ad-Aware 2007 Plus because it has real-time protection. However, the free edition is good enough if you’re tight on budget. But you need a little more work because you have to perform the scan manually and it has no real-time protection.