Network Too Full of Spies

Drudge ^ | Joseph Menn

[KoRn]

# Fed up over problems stemming from viruses and spyware, more computer users are giving up or curbing their use of the Internet.

[KoRn]

Viruses and Spyware are out of control. I have a computer that's hardly ever used and it was heavily infected with spyware when I scanned it.

[KoRn]

Ping!

[82Marine89]

Quit going to porn sites

Use Spybot Search & Destroy and Adaware SE. They're free and they work.

[KoRn]

That PC in particular has never been to a porn site, or any other site for that matter. I think these spyware guys are scanning blocks of addresses and infecting vulnerable hosts.

It happened on a PC I don't really care about and just leave hooked up for misc. stuff....like breaking lol.

[Bobber58]

DING! DING! DING!...We have a winner

[KoRn]

"DING! DING! DING!...We have a winner."

No "we" don't.

[Bobber58]

although, I had to reformat and reinstall, open in aol environment, and download all updates for one of mine before it would act right again

[Brian328i]

Try Slackware Live :) Download it, burn it to cd, pop it in the CD-ROM and boot into Linux, theres also Knoppix.

Slax

[82Marine89]

Hey man, let me live in the moment.

[Bobber58]

LOL...ya, I know how it is...

[Freedom2specul8]

We've avoided being infected with spyware since we started using the opera browser, and disabled popup windows. Every single time we use Internet Explorer, we get "something"...if the "active X" option is selected. However, if we don't select it, many Normal Pages, such as from legitimate news sources won't appear properly on the browser. It completely sux.... If I choose to stop surfing, I can read the news on my cell phone from practically everywhere for $3.40 a month. If we do that, we can't read free republic, nor can we search google etc for other info.

[KoRn]

My concern is how a machine gets this crap on there without really doing anything with it. In the 'good ol' days' a user would have to get onto certain sites, or install programs to get such things, now it seems all a computer has to do is be on the net.

[82Marine89]

Maybe its the trolls exacting their revenge for all those nuclear zots.

[Freedom2specul8]

We've gotten a lot of spyware from playing simple online games at yahoo.

[KoRn]

I have RedHat and Mandrake on all of my main boxes, sans the Domain Controller, and its members. The win box is for throwing around pretty much lol. I recently reinstalled/updated it, went back a few days later, and it was infested.

[Freedom2specul8]

I'm trying to remember which spyware it was...it had something to do with a monkey...

[KoRn]

That's a damned good possibility LOL!

[1stFreedom]

They only work until a virus can defeat them.

I remember using Spybot for a while, I though it was the best thing out there -- till one day it simply couldn't deal with a specific virus. Ad-aware saved the day, and I switched products.

I also worked with Macs, including an XServe. They never had any virus problems.

[82Marine89]

Have you tried Norton Internet Security?

[KoRn]

Using a combo of different scanners has proven to be the best for me at work.