Ad Aware rocks.

[trochee]

exterra's dad is in town; his computer's been having "lots of popups -- do you think you could look at it?"

So I did. His computer turned out to have the graps worm, the ignconnect mal-ware, the bestoftheweb.cc mal-ware, and the msiefr40.dll mal-ware. Possibly more.

I installed and ran Ad-aware (http://www.lavasoft.nu) and it got rid of almost all the spyware, and added the Google toolbar; it's now a lot easier to use. There may still be some lurking bit -- I'm going to recommend he download and pay for the expanded Ad-Aware -- but it's definitely a lot better.

Comments

Ah!

[lx.livejournal.com]

I ♥ the Google toolbar!

How does Ad-aware rate against something like Spybot Search&Destroy ?

Re: Ah!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I know Ad-Aware, but I haven't done a feature-comparison. Do you like Spybot better?

Re: Ah!

[lx.livejournal.com]

Spybot seems a little less user-friendly, though they both seem to have about the same functionality; my comparison wasn't exhaustive but they seemed to catch the same cookies and reg keys that get set. I liked Ad Aware's simple interface. You said you think the commercial version is better?

Re: Ah!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

I think so, but I don't really have any evidence. I use Linux, so I don't really get infected with this stuff -- one advantage of being in the minority and of having a complete computer security model, instead of the hack-job that is Windows.

I told exterra's dad that he should pay for the extended version, but he's got an expense budget and it's shareware doing God's Work -- those who are using it and grateful should easily pay the $15 or $25 to not have to deal with the headache, especially if they're getting the tech support for free. :)

Re: Ah!

[lx.livejournal.com]

Heh! Yes, I think I save myself a lot of grief just by having my Linux firewall but IE is such a shoddy product in terms of its security that things creep in here and there.

And yeah, I know what you mean about the shareware. I like to contribute to them financially when I can.

Hey, which distro of Linux are you running? I've been using RedHat for a long time, mainly because it's what my business was most involved with so I knew it best, but as they are phasing out the non-Enterprise version and promoting Fedora now I'm not totally sure if I should hop on to something like Debian or what. Any idea? One of the main reasons I liked RedHat was how easy it was to grab security updates with up2date over RHN.

Re: Ah!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

I'm using Debian. I have had nothing but good experiences with them, once I had the system running. The only time I've ever had problems with debian was when I did not follow the security update suggestions as driven by apt-get.

Usually, apt-get is even easier to use that up2date, if that's possible!

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -s upgrade # check what it would do
sudo apt-get upgrade # then go ahead

And that's the paranoid way. The trusting way is even easier:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Also, new packages are a breeze to install -- they make the RPM system, which is pretty sweet, look clunky:

sudo apt-get install logjam

(oh, and i'm only using sudo because I'm running pretty tightly locked down -- you could just su - and do everything without the sudo preambles.)

I was just about to post about Debian's recent security compromise, though -- their packages server was cracked, and now they're putting it back together. Stay tuned for some further information, or poke around on http://www.debian.org/News if you want to jump ahead.

Of course, if you're just running a firewall, you might even consider using Knoppix, which is a bootable CD version of Debian. Unbelievably cool.