Comments on: software

By: buddyfarr

buddyfarr — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:55:50 +0000

You also need to look into the manufacturer’s meaning of free.

some software is freeware to use at home on a personal computer but you cannot use it in a business or corporate environment without purchasing a license.

By: jirvine

jirvine — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:21:50 +0000

When I have an infection I need to remove I use AdAware, Spybot (Make sure you immunize, adds blocked sites to IE and the Hosts file), Panda’s Anti Root Kit, AVG Anti Spyware, SpywareBlaster (Doesn’t do anything other than add a large number of bad sites to the deny access rule in IE as well as the Hosts file) and HiJackThis (This one takes some experience to understand what is bad and what is not.) Always be sure to run the updates before you do your scans.

If you can identify the actual name of your infection you can ask the Google Gods for a remover and use that remover. Symantec has a remover for alot of different infections.

There are also some 3rd party commercial stuff like SpySweeper which are very good cleaners.

By: okhotnik

okhotnik — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:24:28 +0000

SpyBot is a really effective tool for its purpose. As previously stated though freeware, shareware and the like do carry risks in that you never really know what is going on under the covers. Before placing any software on your computer it would be wise to do some research to see what information can be found about the product. ALso, if you like the warm, fuzzy of having tech support available, maybe a commercial product would be the way to go.
For those folks that are more technically savvy and have a computer to install new software on and test it, using things like Wireshark to see what traffic is getting generated that would be leaving your environment would be a good way to determine if the product is doing anything inappropriate. Particularly if the packet capture shows encrypted traffic leaving your NIC.

Cheers.