OT: anti-malware progs ineffective

Now purchased by Microsoft !

So the best rated application is bound to go downhill from here on.

"On December 16, 2004, Microsoft announced its acquisition of GIANT Company Software, Inc., a provider of top-rated anti-spyware and Internet security products."

Graham

Follow-up.

Since acquisition by Microsoft - the above ( as Microsoft antispyware ) no longer supports W98SE, ME, 2k or NT !

Read as more income for Microsoft as OS upgrades.

Graham

Didn't you run Linux? I see you're using Agent now.

Interesting discussion so far. I just went to the Zone Alarm web site to check out their products. One option is to "scan your computer for [malware] before downloading...." I pursued that option and got the message:

"You're using Netscape(Mozilla)! Sorry. This is an ActiveX control, it will only run in MS Internet Explorer!"

I likes Firefox, yes I do.

-- Al Brennan

Word

Ken Smith's post reminded me of the part I like the most: When using a new version of M$Word to try to open up a .doc when that .doc was created with an old version of Word, it often botches it.

OpenOffice.org, OTOH, has a reputation for being able to accomplish this without acting retarted.

...................................................

But, in Linux (or any other 'nix), the GUI is totally separate from the kernel ...

So? Read it again. I didn't say a shell 'couldn't be secure'

John

Many of the spyware removal aids that are advertised actually install adware/spyware. One of the guys who was doing this was recently convicted of a crime for this, and was sentanced to jail in the US. However, most of it is offshore.

Don't trust anything you don't pay for, and most of what you do pay for. Use reviews on cnet or pc magazine to determine what to use to kill these things off.

I hate these guys with a passion. At best, they are trying to use my computer for free without my permission. At worst, they are setting up an identity theft. Either way, their crap makes my computer harder to use, and requires me to buy programs (antivirus, spyware removal aids) that I wouldn't buy otherwise. They rank up there with spammers as the chief assholes of the information age.

The thing that gnaws at me is that their tricks are usually as old as the morris worm, and yet microsoft has yet to protect against them. They seem stunned by every trivial stack overflow exploit that comes around, sending out patches which usually screw up other things, and which often don't even fix the problem.

Even linux, with it's macrokernel and loaded dlls that run in the kernel, is prone to these attacks, although it's relative obscurity up till now has protected it. Microkernels, like mach or minix, are the way to go, but nobody seems capable of making a usable system out of these.

Gotta go for OT^4 :-)

Accuradio is working fine here under Mozilla 1.7 and MS Media player

No need to fake your browser for Accuradio or install ActiveX for Mozilla (though I had to put that in for another site I needed).

Browser spoofing is very handy though, If I'm browsing the seedier side of the WWW, I like to be 'XBoX 64 (NVidea GForce 3 Architecture)' Instant result, no more evil browser version targeted scripts :-) (After all, the script kiddies couldn't bear to mess up their XBoxes).

Yes, I had previously tried those four 'minority browser stations' but they are a tiny fraction of the whole site's offering. And their content overlaps anyway. (I emailed the web authors and told them of my dissatisfaction.)

Anyway, pleased to report that I can now get the lot! Yesterday I installed an ActiveX WMP plug-in that's described in detail here:

Listening to some cool jazz from the station right now in FF.

Thanks for the WinAmp pointer, which I'll also follow up.

No, for better or worse I've a Windows user since its inception. Changing my default browser was a major act of faith, but no way I'd contemplate swapping to Linux at this stage!

Knocking on wood... I'm very impressed with Mozilla Firefox. NO adware since I switched from IE. And I don't need StopZilla or Cookie Pal anymore.

...Jim Thompson

Oh, god. Not the old "Popularity breeds vulnerability* garbage again.

One more time for those who have missed the debunking of this old wives' tale:

The Apache Web Server currently runs 68% of all web servers; Microsoft Internet Information Server is currently at 21%. Apache has outstriped M$ in market penetration since 1995.

A quick search turned up several sites that profess to explain how to download updates, and save them for installing later on.

I found this real quick, didn't read the whole thing to know for sure how to do it, but this is a issue a lot of folks have, so I am quite certain there are any number of solutions to the problem, if you have the patience to dig them up.

Don't use windows much, so I haven't done it myself.

John

In article , Don Taylor wrote: [...]

If Windows doesn't do a verify after it writes, it may be just a matter of converting the write command into a read command, turning off some tristate buffers and making the PC hardware think that the read transfers are write transfers.

This way we make the write work as far as Windows is concerned but the actual disk is not written.

Depending on how dumb Windows is we could just say "I'm done!" on uS after Windows does the write command.

Since Windows allows for drivers for disk accesses, we may be able to write software that blocks writes to the C drive but lets them appear to work.

My router has the ability to block a short list of IP addresses. A router that watches for net attackes, remembers the IP and blocks all further access from that IP could work to supress a lot of the troubles.

Unfortunately, the physical location of machines can't be determined from the IP. If it could solutions involving TNT or Plutonium could work.

If we sprinkled the net with PCs that just sat there looking for attackes and keeping a list, there could be a line of routers that downloaded the list from time to time so the system would be self updating.

If instead of simply blocking all writes onto the C drive, we made a circuit that logged them and lit up an LED, there may be something we could do after the fact. A non-windows program could later paw through the list and figure out when the changes were made.

If you had to install a driver, it is likely that it monitors the SMTP activity.

On my product line "we simply don't have bugs". Failure of any kind is frowned on. The customers are about as far from a service center as you can get while still being on the Earth.

Yes but it is fun to think about. Windows NT has been made to run out of ROM. Perhaps Windows XP in a ROM would be the way to solve this. If we can find a company that makes XP in a ROM, we could make a "ROM disk" that plugs onto the IDE cable and only has the real disk for the stuf that really needs to change. This way you wouldn't burn a drive letter in the process.

I suggested the basis for my idea earlier. Make the writes into reads just to get the timing from the read to pretend it is timeing from a write. Putting bidirectional tristates of analog switches in the data lines would prevent the bus conflicts.

How much money do you have? The more complex solutions get expensive to do. If you consider logic in a CPLD or FPGA as hardware, you can make lots of stuff.

A funny sort of hard drive circuit would be one idea. An image of the normal harddrive is made and kept. A circuit causes a second hard drive to write the time and the data every time the systems C drive is written and what is written is different that the old image.

This would give you a log of all the changes to C drive with the times. When a virus is detected, you can step the system back in time by going through the log in reverse order.

You write a new CD because you have created new data.

You write a new CD because you have created new data.

HTML files can't carry viruses so I'm safe.

To re-install Win-ME you have to wipe out stuff so that Win-ME doesn't think that this is merely a repair. If Win-ME thinks it is a repair it carefully keeps all of the viruses safe.

If you wipe stuff, Win-ME upgrade disks refuse to install. They won't even accept a Win-98 CD as proof of this being a real upgrade and not a pirate.

I have to install the Win-98 to get the machine into a state that the Win-ME will then over write. To make the Win-98 install, you can't have the Win-ME installed.

I have to use my Win-98 CD, not hers. Hers is an upgrade version.

Once the system is brough back to a base install of Win-ME, I'd like to be able to update it before hooking onto the net. Microsoft has now made that imposible for me to do. I can't download the updates onto my Linux box.

In article , Kitchen Man wrote: [...]

I suggest: Write it in some other editor, Export as a DOS *.txt file, Read the *.txt file with MS-word. Write a *.doc file.

If you don't need graphics this will work. (At least the document fits the letter of the law)

The format is undocumented.

BTW: If anything you do is secure I think you can discourage Word use like this:

The next time you get a MS-Word document from someone, do a hex dump of it. You will find that word saves some large areas of RAM that may or may not have been written into. These often show up with chunks of other documents etc in them. If you find a real juicy one show it to the guys who care about security.

Not too long ago, I got an MS-Word form to fill out from a company a friend was applying to. I found among other things a number in the form of ###-##-#### and a name in the trash. The HR person must have had that in RAM.

In article , JeffM wrote: [...]

I think Excel also has the security problem I pointed out for Word. A lot of that extra space is just a snapshot of the RAM in the PC when the document was created. They allocate big chuncks of memory, don't clear it and save it as part of the document. Any time you send a MS file out of your PC you are also sending a chunk of who know what.

wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@news.netaccess.co.nz...

Pleased to know it's actually possible to get rid of the f***ing thing. I've just downloaded those 3 software items and will give 'em a try. What I'm ill at ease with, is paying for anti-virus software. The cynical part of me is suspecting I'd then be actively propping up the whole nightmare.

Past day or so I've been using Firefox as the browser which has been no problem. But the major scumware component is still present somewhere in windows and I'm seeing the Internet-Explorer browser opening up over the top of Firefox (or this outlook express) every 6 minutes or so and advertising crap. Even has the cheek to rattle my a: floppy disc drive and then put up an antivrus advert.

Even have my own f***ing bank advertising with coolWWW, so am having to pursue with vigour and extreme predjudice, the bank's marketing people. Each hour megabytes of scumware programmes are self installing all over the hard disc, along with scum p*rn and ringtone icons littered everywhere. They'll continously alter the 'host.TXT' file, the start up prog list, the active running progs,the home page, the IE addons and numerous registry entries. In addition to this, the scumware also enjoys auto-altering certain "permissions" on IE (an oxymoron if ever I saw one) so I can't close it down or get at the 'options tab etc. Have now to run another prog called 'permissions' to reset a number of IE check boxes before I can even start removing the rubbish that's come in. Even tried to remove IE itself

regards john