Everybody knows what hacker attacks are and that they can cause a lot of harm. So, naturally, the best thing is to avoid being attacked, know how to detect an attack right away and act immediately. Unfortunately, hacker attacks can be pretty hard to detect, especially if you are a novice user. Here are a few tips to help you:

1. Suspiciously high outgoing traffic for dial-up and ADSL is the first thing that should attract your attention, especially if you’re not uploading anything at the time. So, if you notice that your outgoing traffic is all of a sudden unusually high, it could mean that your computer has been compromised and used either to send spam or viruses to all your contacts.  Cable users, don’t fret – with cable it is quite normal to have the same amount of outgoing and incoming traffic.
2. Look out for strange looking files in the root directories of your drives and/or too much disk activity. Usually hackers run a thorough scan of your system after they’ve successfully hacked into it. They do it to steal your personal information – like passwords, credit card details, PayPal account details etc. So, increased disk activity and suspicious files might be an indication that your system has either been hacked or is infected with malware.
3. If your personal firewall is reporting blocking large packets of data from the same IP address, that could mean that someone is probing your defences and is trying to break in. The good thing about it all is that if your firewall is blocking the attacks, then it most likely will continue doing so. Remember – having a personal firewall is essential if you want to keep your computer away from harm.
4. A lot of hackers still rely on trojans and backdoors. So, if your anti-virus software starts finding a lot of those, try increasing protection, use an Internet Security suite instead of a basic anti-virus.
5. If you are an Auslogics BoostSpeed user, keep the PC Security option switched on. By doing this you will ensure that services that allow your computer to be accessed remotely are switched off. Naturally, these services aren’t there to help hackers, but hackers use them quite frequently nevertheless.