No fortress can be completely impenetrable, but measure can be taken to prevent vulnerabilities from being exploited. This is done by ensuring that all bases are covered to the best of one’s abilities when evaluating a system. To know if ones’ computer is safe, there are a series of steps and precautions one can take to diagnose the current state. To determine the best plan of action to make the system safer first one should check their settings. Check to make sure that all accounts on the computer are secured by a strong password and are changed and updated frequently on a routine basis. Make sure that all ports that are open on a system make sense to be open and are being used for legitimate function. Close all pots that are not in continual use and monitor the ones that are, to ensure that no suspicious traffic is entering through those ports. Which leads to the next step, which is to check ones’ firewall settings. This is one of the most fundamental setups in a computer’s safety. Often, the operating system that comes with the device has a default firewall. One should check the settings and configurations of the firewall to ensure that it is blocking all miscellaneous traffic and safeguarding the network from malicious attempts to hijack the network and the devices on them. A good rule of thumb is to configure the firewall setting to block all inbound traffic by default and accept connections as exceptions to the default rule. To ensure that this base is covered all around, one should make sure that all outbound traffic is screened as well to ensure that a reverse shell connection is not be configured on accident. Software should be maintained and regularly updated when patches and new editions are released. This helps to ensure that all vulnerabilities that exist as manufacturer oversights are caught before they get out of hand and hackers can exploit them. Lastly, one of the most underrated steps to ensure that the computer is safe, is to ensure that when a document containing sensitive information is no longer needed, it is completely removed and deleted from the system. This would ensure that all sensitive information cannot be retrieved once it is obsolete.