OT: anti-malware progs ineffective

ISTR a case where a spammer's place of business was torched.

...Jim Thompson

John,

There is an extra program to remove the spyware that crashes CWShredder. You can download it here:

Run this program, then run CWShredder and HijackThis.

Hope it helps, Alex Parkinson

If you want to get rid of nearly all spy/adware, and even virus issues, quit using Outlook and Internet Explorer.

Mozilla is a very well done browser, that can be configured to block popup ads, and restricts access to the system. Internet Explorer almost seems to "go out and get" spyware, as it is so vulnerable, and has such little security. Besides, if you don't know what 'tabbed browsing' is, consider checking out Mozilla. It is the best feature ever created for a browser.

Outlook and its offspring Express are wide open front doors for all kinds of havoc on you computer, both for allowing access, and for propogating things.

Use Eudora, or any one of a half dozen other very good programs, and you will find that (Make up random number here) 95% of your problems will go away.

My son uses IE and Outlook, and the cheesy spyware stuff still finds literally hundreds of problems on a weekly basis. I use Mozilla, and MR/2 ICE for windows, and running the same spyware stuff as he does, find maybe one a month.

Complaining feels good, doing something about it is a better idea. Lose IE and Outlook, and see most of the problem go away.

John

Good idea, though I think you're going to need a DVD these days.

I download/save everything to a directory under an "installed" directory on my "D" drive/partition and install from there. Periodically that directory tree gets written to CD.

....along with all the malware already installed.

Why plan on it. It's going to happen anyway. Actually, I'm on year five on this laptop and refused a new one because a re-installation would be a disaster. :-(

Sometimes CWShredder needs to be run from both Windows and Windows in safe mode. Certain processes get stopped and it can do it's job.

I'd love to torture the creators of Gator! Bastards!

Any comments/information/user-reviews for "Secure IE"?

...Jim Thompson

I was surprised to learn today that all anti-adware and anti-spyware programs perform so badly. Here's an extract of the ranking, from 'Anti-adware misses most malware' By Brian Livingston, in

Product Adware Fixed

---------------- ------------ Giant AntiSpyware 63% Webroot Spy Sweeper 48% Ad-Aware SE Personal 47% Pest Patrol 41% SpywareStormer 35% Intermute SpySubtract Pro 34% PC Tools Spyware Doctor 33% Spybot Search & Destroy 33% McAfee AntiSpyware 33% Xblock X-Cleaner Deluxe 31% XoftSpy 27% NoAdware 24% Aluria Spyware Eliminator 23% OmniQuad AntiSpy 16% Spyware COP 15% SpyHunter 15% SpyKiller 2005 15%

So, given that there must be great overlap, I reckon my frequently-used combination of Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search & Destroy is catching little more than half the malware reaching me. Unsettling.

picture, name

off users

congratulating.

e-mail with a publicity-grabbing coup - an online raffle of a

against an unnamed e-mailer last year. "We'll take cars,

Randall Boe. According to Mr Boe, the Porsche's previous owner

I personally believe that the Windows operating system was deliberately designed to allow spyware to work. I cannot imagine that even Microsoft (no matter how technically incompetent everyone says they are) is not capable of developing an OS that is closed to this kind of activity, considering that a huge amount of good OS sourcecode has been available for study for two decades already. I don't think I'm being paranoid and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I always seem to come back to the same conclusion as I continue to think about it!

Fred.

issues,

I wondered how long it was going to take to hear the voice of reason in this thread. I notice that the article that the OP referenced doesn't put this at the top of the list--or even mention it.

Yup.

I'd like to add "and aids in its own hijacking".

Well, its namesake; aside from being prime vectors for infection, the 2 have little in common (not even file names or file formats).

#1 on the list--above MSIE.

Yup.

No. Microsoft also tweaked GIANT's product.

Mistitled. You can make it Internet Exploder MORE secure, but until M$ redesigns it to close the security holes (and breaks backward-compatibility), it will remain insecure. Let's not forget the long latency in MSIE patches either.

Better security for Internet Explorer: (ActiveX / MSIE is a requirement by The Borg for automatic updates.)

Best case: Have a fiend burn his Windows updates to a CD for you. Then you don't have to use Internet Exploder at all. Save bandwidth too.

There is absolutely no justification for VBscript on a Worldwide Web that was concieved so that it would be hardware-/software-agnostic. Same goes for ActiveX. In 2005, there is no more place for dweebs who use this M$-centric junk than there is a place for pages done in FrontPage.

/rant

The problem with some adware/spyware is that they have guard applications, meaning that they install two apps, which are both started when you log in (or start up) and which watch each other. If you kill one of these, the other one will immediately restart it. This makes it nearly impossible for these spyware removal programs to get them.

One thing you can do which at least lets you know what's up is to use msconfig, (start:run:type msconfig) and then go to the 'startup' tab. Programs that start at init time are shown here. You can turn them off here if you want, or go dig around in the registry.

Usually, if you run the spybot cleaner from safemode, (which also doesn't run these init programs) the spybot cleaner programs can remove them. This is only true if it knows about the particular infection, though.

One particularly nasty infection actually installed itself as a windows service... that took some rooting around to eradicate.

I've been using a combination of Norton Antivirus and Spybot Search and Destroy, and my system has been clean of these things for months. Also, I switched to using the Firefox browser. Many of these are installed using backdoors in internet explorer. I *never* run IE these days except for updates from microsoft (which, sadly, require IE). I taught my kids to use firefox as well, and their computer has been clean too.

One other thing, if you use XP, you can turn on the SP2 firewall, which will prevent any infections that may crop up from connecting to their mothership. It blocks outbound connections from programs that you haven't explicitly allowed. It's kinda annoying initially, but it works. Also, use a cable or dsl inbound firewall, and make it 'dark', so it doesn't respond to pings or other queries.

I've been cleaning up systems for friends this way, and it works even for people of limited computer knowledge. I cleaned up my gardener's system a few months ago, and he is happy as a clam. Before, he couldn't use his computer without being inundated with popups. He had 5 actual viruses, and at least 200 forms of adware. (I got a few months of free garden work as well!).

Interesting. I have not heard of it, so I can't comment on it.

Mozilla does everything I need, its free, its not IE :-) and so I wouldn't pay someone for software to fix Microsoft's stuff. Since how M$ has not updated IE in about four years, it stands to reason that a browser that is currently supported and maintained is a good way to go. As usual, YMMV.

If anyone uses the secureIE software, I would be interested in your opinions.

John

It is an indication of how hard it is to remove the malware programs without removing applications or Windows its self. There are several things working against the writers of such software:

(1) You can't simply remove any software that appears to send data over the network without removing portions of Windows.

(2) You can't simply remove any "strange" software since different users have different applications installed and there is a wide variation in what portions of Windows are installed.

(3) There is no direct way to tell the difference between a newer DLL that has some bugs removed and one that has malware added.

I think what may be the best way to solve the problem is to place Windows on a disk as the C drive, install all the applications from the shrink wrapped boxes and then disconnect the write wire of the C drive. From that point on, all the data goes on the D drive or it goes nowhere at all.

I've got some trash called "Cool web search" on my PC at the moment.

In article , john jardine wrote: [....]

"fdisk" will remove it.

I think Windows users should do as follows:

Make sure you have a CD burner. When you burn CDs label them with the date, and what is on them.

As soon as you have a working Windows machine, make a backup of everything onto a CD.

If you are going to download and install something, download it and save the download file onto a CD.

Every time you create something you don't want to lose, write it onto a CD.

Plan on doing a re-install of Windows every 3 Months to a year.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Ken Smith wrote (in ) about 'OT: anti-malware progs ineffective', on Fri, 28 Jan 2005:

You can't then install the weekly crop of updates and bug fixes for Windows itself, not to mention all the apps.

Using windows as a user and not administrator does effectively the same.