Yeah, this isn't the typical TT post, but I thought I'd put it here, anyway, as a public service announcement. We just spent a lot of time here at work doing maintenance on our computers because of adware & spyware. Everybody had been running the free version of Ad Aware on a regular basis. I ran it daily, and had another free program, Spyware Doctor that ran in the background to protect me from new programs, and that I also used to run a full scan daily. Another guy her at work had spent some time comparing programs, and found that Pest Patrol was by far the best of all the anti-spyware/adware programs, freeware or commercial. When I ran that, I found several spyware programs running on my computer that Ad Aware and Spyware Doctor never caught. My computer was the worst, because I had run iMesh, but everybody's computers were infected. Two other badly infected computers had run Bear Share and KaZaA. Plus, when we got into doing the maintenance, we found that everybody's automatic Windows Update had been deactivated by the malware. Anyway, I know some people that frequent this site also use P2P software, so be careful about spyware. Most of the programs (including Ad Aware, Spyware Doctor, and Spybot Search and Destroy) just don't catch all of the programs. We just decided to ban P2P programs here at work, and I don't think I'm going to use them anymore at home, either. We figured that about the only safe way to use a P2P program (since hackers are always going to try to stay ahead of the spyware definitions), is to just completely reinstall your OS every month or so.
I wonder if this goes back to the browser discussion, and if IE is one of the culprits in our computers being so badly infected?
Posted by Fatboy at August 9, 2004 12:51 PMYeah, I too have found Pest Patrol to be the best.
The only drawback is that Spybot and AdAware are free for personal use, whereas Pest Patrol is not - but I didn't let that stop me from obtaining Pest Patrol corporate. If anyone wants a copy, let me know.
Posted by: Chris at August 9, 2004 02:22 PMAlso, PestPatrol works like an antivirus suite. It doesn' just scan and clean, but sets up a shield that prevents spywares from running/installing/etc. I love it when a dialog box pops up out of nowhere with the "PestPatrol has detected the attempted install of Trj32win.exe...what would you like us to do with it?" message. Anyway, it works.
Posted by: Chris at August 10, 2004 03:49 PMCan I have a copy? I suppose I could BitTorrent it, but if you know of another place, just let me know. Word. And since we're talking nerdspeak, XP's SP2 is out (400+ MB), with the one made to install on one home PC coming this week to Automatic Update.
Posted by: Rick at August 10, 2004 04:38 PMTwo more things:
-Though I do - certainly - feel Pest Patrol works the best out of the three big cleaners, I noticed my Pest Patrol corporate only scanned about 25,000 objects when I set up a full C: scan. Ad-Aware home, a freeware, scanned 72,935. Interesting.
- I have not used IE once since reinstalling my OS. In that time I have had exactly one file detected by any of the three scanners, a keylogger I found tonight. Using M$ products, I was guaranteed 10-20 every two weeks.
Posted by: Chris at August 12, 2004 04:00 AMI wish I was rich enough that I spelled my name with a dollar sign- Jeff Lewi$.
And I'll still say in defense of MS, that the main reason IE is so vulverable is because of its popularity- 87% of the visitors to my site so far this month used IE, and I think something like 95% on our work site. Why waste your time writing scripts for the other browsers when so few people use them? But that being said, maybe it is time that I start using a different browser. Whatever the reason for IE's vulnerability, the fact is that it still brings in more malicious code than other browsers.
Posted by: fatboy at August 13, 2004 11:25 AM