Computer virus' on the rise.

[GasSavers_Scott]

It happened to me, I haven't been on my computer for a while, I have had to borrow a lap top to run my business on and I just got the computer back up and running. The people at Microsoft Support worked with me multiple times to get all the virus' off my computer. I haven't had the ability to forum or do gas logs and surf the web.

Microsoft told me that July was a busy month for them, apparently all sorts of worms, counters, fishers, and pop up virus' have been launched. I used to spend 3 or 4 hours on the web and I'v been off almost an entire month, talk about withdrawl.

I had 116 spywear virus' and 28 logger types that sit and watch your habits and profile and report back. I noticed it when I tryed to download an anti-spywear progran and it could not load because there were so many virus' in the way, the program crashed each time. Apparently these little bugs come in on everything.

So I have a new Norton security system I'm installing. Does anyone recomment any other anti-fishing-counter-worm-virus program out there?

[GasSavers_RoadWarrior]

AVG free edition, spybot search and destroy, spysweeper, Fprot/Fprotect (One of those has a free scanner and I always get them confused) Lavasoft Adaware used to be okay too, but haven't used it in a while. Quite often it's a good idea to keep an eye on the PC magazines, they often have "tools" editions where you get several 30 day trials of commercial anti-spyware and virus programs and cleanup utils. Then you have a bunch of stuff on a clean disk that you can use if it gets bad enough that viruses are redirecting you away from "real" anti-virus sites and towards ones that install yet more viruses and spyware.

[theholycow]

I'm a network administrator at a college, and have dealt with a few more infections than usual, lately. They have mostly been spyware and a couple worms, but there was one virus lately too.

Get rid of Norton. It isn't very effective at protection, but it is great at slowing the system and bugging you about updates.

My recommended suite:
AVG Free antivirus
AVG Free antispyware
AVG Free antirootkit
Spybot S&D
Ad-Aware
Firefox with adblock-plus and filterset.g updater (or Opera) for your main browser
Gmail for webmail, or Thunderbird for local POP3 email client
HijackThis (keep it installed so it's ready when you do get infected; it's an important tool for removing lots of modern infections)

Once you're infected the best thing to do is attack the individual infection, the tools above are good at protecting and detecting but not always good at removing (except HijackThis). Often there's a specific tool for removing a particular infection which usually does a decent job...otherwise you may end up needing to find and delete files manually. You may be able to do that in safe mode at the command prompt, or you may need to boot from a Linux live CD. It's a somewhat involved process about which I don't really feel like writing a long piece at the moment...

[GasSavers_RoadWarrior]

You can also use a "HOSTS" file, this is intended as a quick domain name reference table for local machines, so you either don't have to run, or don't have to keep bugging a DNS server all the time. However, if you put entries into this such as

majorspamandvirusportal.com 127.0.0.1

Then every time some other webpage or comprimised computer, or comprimised inline ad tries to redirect a browser window or load something from there, instead of looking up the correct address from the DNS server it will use the local loopback address of your computer 127.0.0.1 and of course not find the scumware it was looking for.

The good part is that you do not have to go looking for each and every nastyware domain name yourself, you can find people who have compiled HOSTS files will many well known "bad" sites in. These may also stop small downloader trojans from finding the huge lump of code they were gonna compromise your system with, if that address became known and was put in there.

So, find a good "HOSTS" file and stick it in the windows dir and it will save you a lot of grief, update it regularly and add entries yourself if you discover a new one or find a particlar ad server particularly annoying. Some of them are a bit over selective though. I had to go in and delete entries in one I got because it blocked images on eBay which was rather annoying.

[GasSavers_Scott]

Thank you so much for the help, I'm priting out the list of anti spyware software.