ARGH! Something's infested my computer!

[Master Xaio]

I've found I can get by with 3 or 4 programs for regular maintence and protection.

1. Zonealarm.  Awesome Firewall.
2. Regcleaner - used to be free, now no longer free.  Great for cleaning out the registry.
3. Ad-Aware
4. Occaisionally, Norton Antivirus 2003, about once every 6 months.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

urk... conniption forming.

run your damn AV more than once every 6 months or expect any email you send me to be deleted unread.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Yeah that like saying I sterilize every sixth needle or wear a condom for every sixth girl.

Not that im advocating drug use or loose premarital sex...

[stacer]

I have a question about antiviral, actually. My Norton has never never never found anything. I installed McAfee a few weeks ago (free from my DSL provider) and it started to interfere with all sorts of processes, which it shouldn't. I was able to run it once and it found one virus and a trojan horse. Cleaned it out, but had to uninstall McAfee for the computer to run right again. What's up with that? Why didn't Norton catch it? I run Norton once a week, right after it downloads the new virus definitions, and it's on autoprotect all the time, but I worry that it's been disabled somehow.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

There was an article about it in Wired a while ago... what I understood is that the New Malware falls in a grey area that few companies have programmed for since they actually take advantage of using backdoors and loopholes in the windows programming (a good example is spyware), whats more a lot of new viruses actually attack Norton or Macaffee and disable them you can think of them as the AIDS of the computing world.

[Spriggan]

Becaue certian viruses can effectively hide themselfs from virus scanners.  I actualy had one once that disabled my norton.  Also if you don't ever update your virus definitions (via subscription) you might as well not have it installed.  McAfee is a better AV then Norton, but they charge a lot more for a yearly subscription (on adverage it's 3 times more then Norton).

As for interfering with Processes, all AV programs do that.  There are allwayse some programs that don't get along with AVs.  It's just something you have to live with.

[stacer]

Right, but when it makes the computer shut down, and doesn't allow it to ever completely boot up, there's a problem. It only booted up once in about ten tries.

[Spriggan]

It's either you have some virus on your PC that donsen't like the program, or your PC's configuration donsen't.  It happenes, all be it not very often.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I use F-Secure myself. It's worked quite nicely.

[stacer]

SE, can you tell me more about it? I'd like to be sure there's nothing on my computer. My roommate just had to have hers wiped because she had a backdoor virus that couldn't be cleaned. She lost everything.

(Speaking of which, I should spend my day off today backing up! It's Marathon Monday--Patriots Day--here in Mass. I'm going downtown later to watch some friends cross the finish line.)

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

http://www.f-secure.com/

A one year renewal of virus definition updates are ~$40. The program itself is $60 and includes a year of updates. if you leave it online and let it auto-update, it'll do that pretty much daily.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,62222,00.html

Heres a nice primer from wired on how to cheaply protect your computer

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

http://www.abisoft.net/documents/DefendingAgainstaTrojanHorse.pdf and heres some stuff by Abisoft for defending against trojans

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

This is the best though from Information Security magazine...

http://infosecuritymag.techtarget.com/2002/may/combatingmalware.shtml

[Entsuropi]

Ah, i must have thought SE liked spybot S&D, when he meant Adaware. It's all Gemms fault.