The Ritual
I'm paranoid.
At least when it comes to my home computers. There's a lot of malware floating around on the net these days and a good portion of it can be contracted through the most mundane surfing. With all the the hyperlinks and pop ups and crap out there, you are bound to get your computer full of script-kiddie crap. For those of you that don't perform routine cleansing of your home machines: I would highly recommend it. Oh, and use a personal firewall. Zonealarm is nice and basic, Sygate if you want something a little meatier.
Here's what my ritual includes: I clean up my browser cache and defrag my system. I like things tidy. Then I update my definitions and run my antiviral. I prefer AVG. They update the definitions regularly and it's easy to install and use. Then I update my definitions for Ad-aware and run that bad boy. Full system scan. Then just to make sure no residuals are left I run Spybot Search and Destroy. Then I reboot and go about my merry way. Recollecting all the crap so I can clean it all off again next time.
Even with doing all of that I still managed to get a keylogger trojan on my system the other day which took me hours of research to finally get cleaned. Nothing in the above caught it, but I noticed it through sheer luck in my task manager processes. Something just didn't look quite right.
Are you worried yet? You should be. There's a lot of bad people with apparently nothing better to do than try to scam your passwords for your bank account and credit card numbers from online shopping systems and go on a spree.
At least when it comes to my home computers. There's a lot of malware floating around on the net these days and a good portion of it can be contracted through the most mundane surfing. With all the the hyperlinks and pop ups and crap out there, you are bound to get your computer full of script-kiddie crap. For those of you that don't perform routine cleansing of your home machines: I would highly recommend it. Oh, and use a personal firewall. Zonealarm is nice and basic, Sygate if you want something a little meatier.
Here's what my ritual includes: I clean up my browser cache and defrag my system. I like things tidy. Then I update my definitions and run my antiviral. I prefer AVG. They update the definitions regularly and it's easy to install and use. Then I update my definitions for Ad-aware and run that bad boy. Full system scan. Then just to make sure no residuals are left I run Spybot Search and Destroy. Then I reboot and go about my merry way. Recollecting all the crap so I can clean it all off again next time.
Even with doing all of that I still managed to get a keylogger trojan on my system the other day which took me hours of research to finally get cleaned. Nothing in the above caught it, but I noticed it through sheer luck in my task manager processes. Something just didn't look quite right.
Are you worried yet? You should be. There's a lot of bad people with apparently nothing better to do than try to scam your passwords for your bank account and credit card numbers from online shopping systems and go on a spree.
4 Comments:
Ooh thanks for the tips! I need to give mine a good cleaning. I run my virus checker weekly and do defrags, and delete temp files often. Adware is the suq! I need to search and destroy it!
Yep, anything to help keep the internet clean. If you computer ever acts weird or you have suspicions even after you've run all those, go to your task manager and check on your processes. Do Google searches on all of 'em and see if there are any articles on them that indicate they could be malware. That's how I found the nasty keylogger I had awhile back.
geez that would take me forever i have so many processes. I'm sure some of them are bad I'll have to take the time to do this one of these days...
That's why you run all your antiviral and spyware removers first. Then you shut down everything you possibly can. *Then* you check your processes for anything funky.
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