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Posted by Adrienne Boswell on 07/12/07 05:30
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Neredbojias
<neredbojias@gmail.com> writing in
news:Xns996ADB0D2AAD7nanopandaneredbojias@198.186.190.165:
> Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Wed, 11 Jul 2007
> 20:11:27 GMT Adrienne Boswell scribed:
>
>> I have a good friend who asked me to come out and take a look at her
>> daughter's computer because it was really slow. Spybot Search and
>> Destroy came up with 1,401 malware programs and/or tracking cookies.
>> The anti- virus came up with 89 viruses and trojans. I got
>> everything cleaned up, installed a Hosts manager, Firefox and Opera
>> (default). Then I told them that IE was off limits.
>>
>> Three days to fix this. Scarey.
>
> I have good and current anti-virus software, but what are these 1401
> malware programs you're talking about? Will using something like
> Ad-Aware regularly prevent such things? Firefox is my favorite
> browser, but at times I have to use ie (6) for various reasons.
>
I use AVG Free from Grisoft - been using it for years, IIRC, I heard
about it here in alt.html many, many moons ago. It runs a complete check
every night.
As far as malware, I use Spybot Search and Destroy. It seems to do
better than Lavasoft. It runs a bot/ware check every Saturday night.
Here are some of the preventative measures I use:
1. Hosts file with DNS Client disabled - there's no place like 127.0.0.1.
I don't get to see a lot of adverts, I miss a lot of third party cookies,
and I don't get to go to a lot of sites (gambling, porn, etc.) that I
don't care about anyway. Of course, I could edit the hosts file, or
disable it if I _want_ to go somewhere strange. I just got Hosts Manager
from <http://www.abelhadigital.com/> . Very nice program.
2. I use Spyware Blaster
<http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html>, and I keep it up
to date.
3. I use Sunbelt Personal firewall (used to be Kerio). I like it much
more than others because it's not memory hungry, and it also alerts me if
one program is trying to start another.
4. StartUp Monitor and StartUp Control Panel from Mike Lin
<http://www.mlin.net/>. Startup Monitor sits nicely waiting to stop
anything the wants to change the startup options (Adobe, Quicktime, etc
all try to have themselves loaded at startup). Startup Control Panel is
great for managing what happens on startup.
All of the programs I use have little footprints. I don't usually like
using suites, and I stear very clear from Norton - it's a PITA to try to
remove and uses waaaaayyyy too much memory.
Well, those are my recommendations. I've been doing things like this for
a long time, and I've never had a virus or malware problem. I hope my
list will help someone else.
--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share
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