There are the popups, spyware, viruses and spam that you see, or can see easily if you run a program to look for it. These are motivated by either juvenile messing around, or the desire to sell you something (or at least to get your money under the pretense of selling you something).
That stuff is pretty easy - so long as you have cleaned it up enough that it doesn't annoy you, you're done. It's like the dirt that collects on your car. How much dirt you will tolerate, versus how much time or money you will spend cleaning depends on personal preference.
The other stuff does its best not to let you see it. It is either trying to steal data, such as with a key logger that might catch a password to your bank, or it is trying to steal your PC, to use as a bot for attacking other computers on the internet. That stuff is motivated by serious greed, or a serious desire to commit acts of terrorism against the internet. It is getting increasingly good at staying hidden.
If you have a PC that is connected to an always up DSL line, then it is a prime candidate for being hijacked as a remotely controlled bot, without your knowledge.
The latest research on this suggests you've got an average of 12 minutes on the internet with a naked PC before being hijacked. Are you really going to reimage every 12 minutes? I doubt it.
From http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/07/01/sophos_1h05_malware_report/ :
By John Leyden 1 Jul 2005 10:54
Malware authors up the ante
Malware authors have increased both the volume and sophistication of their attacks over the last six months. In the first half of 2005 anti-virus firm Sophos detected and protected against 7,944 new viruses - up 59 per cent from the first six months of 2004. The number of keylogging Trojans has tripled in the first six months of 2005 compared to the first half of 2004.
More computer viruses and worms mean an unprotected Windows PC (without either firewall or antivirus protection) stands a 50 per cent chance of infection by a worm after just 12 minutes online. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, conceded that Windows PCs no longer ship in this unprotected state. Nonetheless the finding illustrates the need to apply basic defences (consumers can find free products aplenty if they choose to look).
The longstanding Zafi-D worm, which poses as a Christmas card greeting, made up more than a quarter of all viruses reported to Sophos so far this year. Runner up was the long-running NetSky-P worm with the bilingual Sober-N worm, which poses as offers for free tickets to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, in third place.
"The threats are consolidating - it's becoming more blurred as to whether something is a spam, a spyware, a phish or a virus problem. Businesses must ensure they are protected against all of these threats," Cluley added. ®
Please don't run naked systems on the internet. Even if you don't see a problem, and even if you are not doing anything on that PC that you don't mind having recorded by keyloggers owned by nasty people, your PC becomes a bot that will be used to attack the rest of us, and used in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks that have taken down major sites, and big chunks of the internet.
Please at least run behind a hardware firewall. You can usually find one for $20 to $30 at newegg.com by searching for "firewall", and sorting by "lowest price". Todays special:
| View Pic |
|
 |
Also, if you are running Windows, please either install Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), or else, after installing Windows, go _first_ directly to the Windows Update site, available off a pull-down from one of the Internet Explorer menus, and install all the patches, before going to any other website.
The above, plus re-imaging every month from the clean installation you had after updating the Windows patches, would be much safer for the rest of us than a naked system. The best imaging software for Windows users seems to be Symantec’s Norton Ghost 9.0