Spyware following spam into the enterprise

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Re: Spyware following spam into the enterprise

hbill wrote:
> I enjoyed reading your article and have
> learned a couple of new things. Given the
> facts in your article, out in the over-the-
> counter market, what is the very best
> spyware/malware removal programs that one can
> purchase for both business and home use? Also,
> in linking to a sight, say for research, can
> one's system inadvertantly be uploading
> spyware at the same time as receiving the data
> of the search? Please send me info, if you are
> not going to be heading your next article with
> the info of my two queries. Thank you, and
> thank you for all the excellent information
> you cover.

Bill,

It seems to be pretty rare for ZDNet authors to participate in these discussions, even for their own articles.

"...best spyware/malware removal programs that one can purchase for both business and home use?" Recent issues of several PC magazines have run reviews of 4 or 5 of the most well known, but these reviews are far from complete. I detailed a few of the best freeware and trialware tools in an earlier post on this topic. For a way more thorough list of what's out there check out http://www.spychecker.com. (Look for the "Download Anti-Spy Tools" link.) Lots of them are trialware but many are freeware. The downside is that they aren't able to centrally manage more than one PC, but admin console versions of several products are coming. It's hard to recommend anything beyond the freeware tools at this point, as commercial tools are just becoming available and are not yet mature. I do know Symantec (a.k.a. Norton) and McAfee are beginning to roll out spyware detection, removal, and prevention in their corporate offerings, but again they are not yet mature and I have yet to see any reviews of these products.

If you feel like getting even more paranoid here's a great article on PC privacy and security: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,13921,00.asp

Part II has lots of great links to tools of all kinds. One trojan horse detection tool that isn't mentioned (besides TDS-3 which I detailed in a previous post on this topic) is "The Cleaner" (http://www.moosoft.com), although I have not used this one so I can't vouch for it.

It also mentions tools for detecting keyloggers, yet another threat that doesn't fit neatly into the other categories. Check out http://www.anti-keyloggers.com.

To answer your second question, I have yet to hear of spyware spreading in this manner (uploading from an infected PC via web browser to another computer) since web sites are generally read-only, but I'm sure it is technically possible and only a matter of time before it happens. It is certainly already possible for spyware/trojans/viruses, etc. to be coded directly into a web page so you can get infected just by visiting the page, no link to click on or anything to download other than the page itself. This is pretty scary for a Windows user, and reason alone for not using an Admin privileged account for day-to-day use. You don't want that hidden, bad code to have full access to your registy and file system. It's also a good reason to either switch browsers entirely (Mozilla Firefox seems to be the best candidate right now), or lock down IE's security settings to prevent exploits, either by manually changing its security settings or by using a third party tool such as SpywareBlaster (http://www.javacoolsoftware.com).

Hope this helps. There is a ton of info only a Google search away if you want to delve deeper.

Posted by: crm_z   Posted on: 06/01/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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