Suggestion of anti-spy and anti-virus software [Archive]

Sarlon

03-30-2008, 02:26 PM

avast antivirus is what I highly recommend for an antivirus...its free to download and just requires a valid email address to register. You can download it here (http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html)...

for a spywear program I'd also highly recommend spybot search and destroy and can be downloaded here (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html)

if you need an adware program also...I'd recommend Adaware and it can be found here (http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-2007/3000-8022_4-10045910.html?part=dl-ad-aware&subj=dl&tag=top5&cdlpid=10045910)

All of these are free to download and use and I use them personally on my own compuer and as long as you keep them up todate, and run them regularlly they keep you fine. With avast, they have a pop up that comes up with sound effects that comes up when it detects a virus...very annoying but great deterent.

Gravekeeper

03-30-2008, 02:27 PM

I cover my bases with AVG ( Free <3 ) and Spybot + Teatimer ( Also free <3 ).

I will never use Mcafee again. Not only is it huge and bloated but it completely failed to catch a Trojan on me once. I had no idea what or where it was. Reinstalled AVG, AVG found it immediately. <mutter>

Also its a pain the ass as it creeps up as the culprit in half my tech support calls on one account. =p

Not really fond of Avast either to be honest. Adaware is nice to DL and run once every few months or so just to clean out tracker url crap if you don't know where to find it manually. But Spybot/Teatimer stops practically every actual spyware I've ever encountered. With the registry change notification on nothing slips past.

Oh, and if you're already in the shiat with a worm or Trojan. You want Killbox. Killbox it to Hell.

tropicsgoddess

03-30-2008, 02:42 PM

I agree with AVG..it's awesome and it's FREE!!!! :D

LostMyMind

03-30-2008, 02:53 PM

The most important part is to boot in safe mode when you go virus hunting.

I would get hijack this, just so you can do a quick look at the startups. and remove any that don't look right. (or those annoying IE add-ons malware). There are also several on-line scans. My personal favorite one is virusscan.jotti.org You can upload a single file and it will scan that file against 21 different virus scanners. I like using hijack this and check every file that gets loaded.

PaRaGaS

03-30-2008, 03:09 PM

draggar

03-30-2008, 03:53 PM

My quick reply didn't post.

If you're looking at something on the fly, not installed, try

http://housecall.antivirus.com

It's run by Symantec and very thorough. You run it from the web page, boot the PC into safe mode with network support for the best results.

But, if you don't mind installing, I agree w/ AVG, but also get Ad-Aware and SpyBot.

As for something that can be run from a USB drive, I don't have any suggestions.

PaRaGaS

03-30-2008, 06:18 PM

But, if you don't mind installing, I agree w/ AVG, but also get Ad-Aware and SpyBot.

That's basically what I was thinking, but I 've seen some bad things written about Ad-Aware here, so I thought that professional opinion would be nice.

sld72382

03-30-2008, 06:21 PM

Here's my picks:

1. Smitfraudfix. Takes less than a minute to run and gets rid of those annoying "fake alerts" that many people are getting.

2. CounterSpy.* One of the best scanners I've used.

3. AVG, Avast or AntiVir. All 3 are free.

4. F-prot - only a trial, but it works really well.

5. Hijackthis.

6. Vundofix. Slow, but works in getting virtumonde/vundo off a person's system.

Programs I would avoid:

1. Spysweeper. Only remotely effective if you install the version with virus detection and run it with rootkit detection enabled. Plus, Webroot has a tendency to "cave" to Spyware vendors who don't like Spysweeper catching their shit as spyware. Which is why things like MyWebSearch and WinAntivirus aren't detected.

2. Ad-ware. It's popularity is also it's downfall. Almost all new spywares just bypass it. Don't bother. Also, like Webroot Lavasoft tends to "cave" to whiny spyware vendors.

3. Spybot. It's effective, but it also lists a ton of false postives. I've seen people's computers wrecked because they took Spybot's word that a program was bad when it was legit.

4. Anything by Norton or McAfee. Do I really have to explain?

*Sunbelt is coming with with a new software called "Vipre" that combines CounterSpy with an Antivirus program. Will be worth checking out!

PaRaGaS

03-30-2008, 06:35 PM

4. Anything by Norton or McAfee. Do I really have to explain?

Not really, I have the exact same opinion :D
Thanks, that's pretty much what I was looking for!
I wouldn't have found all this useful software on my own I think.

rvdammit

03-30-2008, 08:23 PM

With avast, they have a pop up that comes up with sound effects that comes up when it detects a virus...very annoying but great deterent.

The sounds can be disabled in the Avast settings.

LostMyMind

03-31-2008, 02:13 PM

*Sunbelt is coming with with a new software called "Vipre" that combines CounterSpy with an Antivirus program. Will be worth checking out!
/thread hijack
Well, that one of the reasons I like comodo's newest firewall. They combined a malware scanner/prevention with their firewall. It's not an anti-virus, but if you put it on paranoid mode it'll prompt you for every program's attempt to do anything and you can decide if you'll let that program do it. Which is handy. I sometimes don't even let some games have access to the control panel. You'll be surprise how many lazy programmers are there that access things they really don't need to be accessing.
/hijack over

Well, let us know if you manage to get it cleaned without resorting to demagnetizing the hard-drive :devil:

Broomjockey

03-31-2008, 02:23 PM

LostMyMind

03-31-2008, 02:38 PM

It's more of the "It's too dangerous for the general public to have" way of thinking.

Problem with any malware/virus scanner is false positive. There will always be false positive. If a scanner produce too many false positive and you accepted the false positives.....

As long as you know what and why it's flagging things as "malware" and you actually take the time to check if it really is a malware. It's not a problem. However, if you blindly accept it's word that something is a malware (or trace of a malware) and remove a system dependency file/registry entry/etc.... Well. we all know what happens when that happens.

vman

03-31-2008, 06:04 PM

/thread hijack
Well, that one of the reasons I like comodo's newest firewall. They combined a malware scanner/prevention with their firewall. It's not an anti-virus, but if you put it on paranoid mode it'll prompt you for every program's attempt to do anything and you can decide if you'll let that program do it. Which is handy. I sometimes don't even let some games have access to the control panel. You'll be surprise how many lazy programmers are there that access things they really don't need to be accessing.
/hijack over

Well, let us know if you manage to get it cleaned without resorting to demagnetizing the hard-drive :devil:

/More threadjack

To be fair to those lazy programmers, some operations which *seem* like they wouldn't need to access the control panel, do, in fact, require the control panel (or windows diagnostics, depending on what you're doing).

PaRaGaS

03-31-2008, 07:30 PM

Thanks for your help everyone, I'm currently sittin' here and waiting for CounterSpy to finish scanning.

This guy had SO MUCH spyware, trojans, porn dialers.
Argh! And he's a professor, scientist, speaks some 15 languages. A parliament member too.

He actually "purchased" something from one of the bogus spyware ads, Pandora Software or such. It looked "legit", so he didn't hesitate to post his CVV2 code! He didn't even know how much risk it posed. We had the card suspended as soon as I found out about his actions.

Seriously, how can someone that intelligent be this naive?

sld72382

03-31-2008, 09:56 PM

What surprises me is sld's condemnation of Spy-bot. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything bad about it before.
Was that just because the user didn't know what they were doing, or was it a deeper issue?
(threadjacking because of a recent install... :D)

What the post below you said.

Before my company made it mandatory to uninstall ANYTHING we download on client's PCs, we would leave malware tools and 3rd party browsers on client's PC as a gesture of good will. That included Spybot. Well, clients started using it on their own and didn't bother checking Spybot's scan results for false positives and many messed up their systems.

These people would call us and demand support, and we would tell them their 5 day warranty was up and to call the vendor. Well, the vendor would tell them to call us as we installed it. These client would call back screaming with the same excuse "YOU installed it, therefore you MUST help me!" This happened so many times that Spybot's vendor told our corp honchos "Do NOT let your techs use our product anymore."

Then we needed, as I said before, to uninstall ANYTHING we used. Even if it's something harmless like Firefox. People would have the mentality that because we installed it, we need to support it. The corp honchos got fed up at people calling us after our warranty expired and then getting angry when we told them they (GASP!) need to call the vendor.

LostMyMind

03-31-2008, 10:46 PM

/More threadjack

To be fair to those lazy programmers, some operations which *seem* like they wouldn't need to access the control panel, do, in fact, require the control panel (or windows diagnostics, depending on what you're doing).
If you've read my remark, I said "games even access the control panel". There is no reason for a video game to access the control panel. Which is why I love the selective access the comodo firewall gives me.
Seriously, how can someone that intelligent be this naive?
Just because someone got some intelligence don't mean they got common sense. :D

Mr. Rager!

04-01-2008, 04:15 AM

I recommend Kaspersky.

PC-Cillin Internet Security Pro is also phenomenal.

vman

04-01-2008, 12:57 PM

If you've read my remark, I said "games even access the control panel". There is no reason for a video game to access the control panel. Which is why I love the selective access the comodo firewall gives me.

My point was simply that when developing, the libraries that developers use sometimes have surprising bits in them. Would you believe, for instance, that to get a process ID for the piece of code that's running, you need to use the diagnostics assembly in .NET? Or, to find the memory usage? That sounds innocuous until you realize that the diagnostics assembly requires admin access to the machine to be called.

So yeah, the programmers are lazy, or they actually had to use a code library that for some reason or other the vendor made require access to the control panel.

LostMyMind

04-01-2008, 01:59 PM

Aye, .NET is the worst of them all. Microsoft was extremely lazy when they built that "library".

However, you have to wonder if it was necessary if the program still works perfectly fine with denied access. :lol: Which is why, I make most of those system calls myself directly and not through a library. But then again, I'm so old school that I'll build my own database server/client before actually using already existing database server/client system. Only because in those days that is what you did.

Anyway, back to spreading hate toward malware and viruses.

Eric the Grey

04-05-2008, 05:32 AM

I know that some of you here work in the field of troubleshooting such things, I need reliable bug detection/removal software that I could run from a flash drive or CD on someone's computer. Please post your favorite, trusted software and also one you wouldn't use. It will help me a lot, thanks.

For an Anti-virus product that can be run from a thumdrive, give the Portable Apps suite (http://portableapps.com/) a shot. They have ClamWin portable (http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/clamwin_portable) available for scanning.

Unfortunately, they don't have a portable spyware scanner, but you can always keep the installation files on your thumb drive and install as necessary. That's what I do.

Here's my picks:

2. Ad-ware. It's popularity is also it's downfall. Almost all new spywares just bypass it. Don't bother. Also, like Webroot Lavasoft tends to "cave" to whiny spyware vendors.

Ad-ware is not Ad-Aware! Ad-Aware is the original, and Ad-ware, if I remember correctly, was an ad-bot that tried to pawn itself off on Ad-Aware's success, and thus infected many PC's with crapware.

Just FYI. :D

:cool: Eric the Grey

LostMyMind

04-05-2008, 04:14 PM

I'm sure that was just a misspelling ;) But the point is the same. Because it's so popular many virus check if it's running and then bypass it. Just like they did (and still do) with Norton and Mcafee.

Mr. Rager!

04-09-2008, 03:09 PM

If you had a lot of spyware and what not... you might want to backup important files and do a reformat on a computer.

There are a lot of viruses that will jump around to avoid detection, change names to avoid detection. A virus can mean big business, so even though your computer doesn't seem like it has a virus, it could still have a virus and might be used as a bot as we speak.

So, do yourself and others a favor, save all the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs you installed to a disc and reformat the drive and re-install them.

PaRaGaS

04-10-2008, 07:38 AM

So, do yourself and others a favor, save all the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs you installed to a disc and reformat the drive and re-install them.

Like I already said, I am NOT a newbie.
Not exactly pro, but I've built and maintained computers for myself, friends and family for some years. I just needed a good package of cleaning software that I could trust. Thanks for your concern :)
And that guy had a LOT going on on his desktop. Eek.

BTW, while on the topic. What would you guys prefer as your backup solution - two external drives (let's say, 1TB eSata) synched weekly with the PC or a dedicated network storage solution, like this one (http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1175233152539&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=5253921008B08)?
Internal drives in RAID1 are out of the question, too much field for failure there.
I need to have a backup of my music and RAW photographs (each shoot is ~1GB or more).

*edit*
I just read the detailed spec sheet for NAS200, it only support IEEE802.3u.
PITA to backup hundreds of gigabytes of data every week using that, much.

The more I read, the more I'm leaning towards an internal solution after all. Meh...

lordlundar

04-10-2008, 04:28 PM

I would say go the Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/products.aspx). It's basically a multidrive automated external drive. You can modify how many drives you want in and can swap them out as need be (it uses the new screwless install setup so it's as simple as snapping the rails onto the drive and slide it in) And your space limit is up to you. It uses standard 3.5" SATA drives and uses USB 2.0 so any modern machine will work with it.

My oly real beef with it is that FireWire, SCSI or eSATA would be faster, but those aren't a widely implemented.

PaRaGaS

04-10-2008, 06:28 PM

Mr. Rager!

04-10-2008, 10:28 PM

Like I already said, I am NOT a newbie.
Not exactly pro, but I've built and maintained computers for myself, friends and family for some years. I just needed a good package of cleaning software that I could trust. Thanks for your concern :)
And that guy had a LOT going on on his desktop. Eek.

Sorry, to me it just seemed like you were relying on the scans. I don't put any faith in them once a computer has been infected. :o

Eric the Grey

04-18-2008, 03:53 AM

I seek a RAID1 compatible solution specifically. eSATA would be much appreciated. Haven't found anything worthwhile. Just plain USB is too slow and there are always compatibility/driver issues.

USB isn't too slow, as long as you're not waiting for it to finish. Just set your backup to run while you're away from the computer.

I use a single USB drive (I'd love to go RAID1, but can't afford it right now) and Norton Save and Restore (http://www.symantec.com/norton/products/overview.jsp?pcid=br&pvid=nsr20) for backup software. It backs up my C: drive on a weekly basis, when I'm not around to have to wait on it. My other drives are backed up on occasion, whenever I think they've changed enough to warrant it. For the most part, they only have games, and other data that doesn't change all that often.

NSR is the only Symantec product that I have on my systems. It does the job it needs to do extremely well. I've restored both my XP Laptop and my Vista desktop without issue using it after some problem. You can also mount your saves as a drive, and browse through them for files to restore, or search for them.

I know I'm sounding like a spokesman, but it's the best backup and restore software I've seen for a home PC, and I have no association with Symantec, although with all the pushing I do, I should get a commission. :p

EDIT: I almost forgot, if you DO go with NSR, remember to disable (stop and set to disabled) the "Norton Protection Center" service. It's the most annoying thing and serves no purpose at all, other than to annoy you daily about your windows updates being set to download only... :p

:cool: Eric the Grey