1. Restrict all of your internal network shares / share only what you must and provide good passwords for access to those resources. (This will minimize the impact of a potential worm if one of your machines is compromised.)

2. Provide good virus protection for all of your machines on the network. (This should protect you from software and content that looks innocent but isn't.)

3. Make sure you have a good and working backup for all of your machines (If one of your machines blew-up (software-got-jacked!--Can you return this machine to a good working state with minimal effort?)) (Can you restore any missing data.)

The above are general recommendations for good computing.

I make the additional recommendations for the machine you plan to use on a file-sharing network. I make these recommendations for people who download a lot of stuff.


If you DO NOT understand the various methodologies for tracking changes to your system. Then recommending a bunch of tools (freeware) will not help you if you DON'T know what your doing. So I'll skip that for now and provide some more general recommendations.

a. Make sure you are already employing safe computing practices for this machine.

b. If you can afford it use this machine for this purpose only.

c. sysgate - (www.sygate.com) makes a personal firewall. Install this personal firewall in addition to the one you have protecting your network. (I make this recommendation because it allows you to specifically authorize inbound - outbound communications to and from the machine you are using on a filesharing network.)

Most people think that they are protected from hackers when they install a firewall. Yes firewall can provide some general protection from cetain types of exploits but--it is useless if you are downloading and installing software that uses your internal-trusted machine as a launching pad to send information to untrusted sources. It is also useless if your interal trusted machine is used to gain access to other machines behind your firewall.

d. http://www.sysinternals.com/ makes a lot of tools for tracking changes and running processes on your machine (I'd recommend learning how to use some of these before you go live.)


e. After you download and try programs that came from untrusted sources. I would recommend completely wiping your machine and restoring it from a backup. (This way you return your machine to a known-good-state)

Many of these recommendations are time-consuming but worth it if you want download and run stuff from untrusted sources.