I’ve been very fortunate to have never been hit with spy/ad-ware. I’ve always been careful, and I’ve tried to teach my wife what actions are smart and which ones are not. Last night, however, I was looking for some information and ended up downloading a file from a shady website.
After scanning the file and finding no viruses, I ran the executable. How stupid. It immediately began installing adware and my antivirus app began showing warnings of a trojan being installed. I quarantined the files that were causing problems, and while I was doing that, a few more non-cancellable installers ran before I could stop them. I immediately pulled the power plug from the wall.
It took me about 2 hours to get everything worked out last night, but in the end I learned two things: (A) Don’t be a freakin’ moron, you freakin’ moron, and (B) there are some really good anti-adware tools out there that I didn’t know about. Here are a few useful tools/apps that I want to share with those that may not know about them:
- How to fix mom’s computer. Sounds like what I did over the holidays. Use this guide to fix your parents (or your own) adware-infested computer.
- Online Port Scan. This free online utility checks your computer for ports that may be open to attack.
- Ad-Aware. Spyware scan and removal utility.
- ZoneAlarm. A very good software firewall application and AntiVirus application. Free version available.
- Spybot Search & Destroy. This application prevents bad software from being installed in the first place.
- AntiVir. A free AntiVirus application for Windows, protecting against over 80,000 viruses. (I’ve already got Norton AntiVirus, and ZoneAlarm has their own AV app)
- Hijack-This. This application tracks what processes are currently running. Great for detecting malware.
I’ve now learned that it doesn’t matter how good you are. If you’re willing to take a risk, you need to be willing to accept the consequences of that risk. Anyway, I hope this helps.
Andrew Krespanis
December 30, 2004
Ouch. Painful way to spend a couple of hours :\
Ad-Aware, Zone-Alarm and Norton AV Enterprise edition are my current combo, the only problem with Zone alarm is that it blocks ‘application/xhtml+xml’ pages in high security mode; besides that it’s fantastic. In 4 months it has blocked 1176 connection attempts and 98 real attacks. Another great addition is CleanMyPC Registry Cleaner. It’s not free, but it’s very effective; finding everything from potentially malicious entries to invalid font references. I don’t really need it now that I’ve told ZoneAlarm not to let IE access the net, but I still run it a couple of times per week to keep things neat.
It’s funny how anyone who works with computers is assumed to be a ‘techy’ and capable of fixing any computer related problem. At a recent party I was trying to burn a friend’s animation folio and his computer kept locking up. Upon restart, an app called ‘Error Guard’ told me that his system had 270 critical errors that it could fix for $29.95. To make matters worse, the app used the XP Firewall icon, but had absolutely no MS branding or the word Microsoft in the ‘about’ box. Needless to say, Error Guard is the mother of all spyware/adware; a looping pop-up generator from hell! It took two hours, AVG, Zone-Alarm and CleanMyPC to get the stoopid thing stable and clean… all I wanted to do was burn a CD.
Anyhoo enough ranting — I just wanted to add a regestry cleaning utility to your list