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

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.