I have read a few articles and spoken to a few people as of late that have made me think….. What the hell are people doing on the internet? The BBC do a good little tech program called “Click” that seems to be exiled to the realms of “BBC News Channel” (small hours) and BBC1 (even smaller hours), I suggest that anyone who has a PC watch this program as its quite informative don’t stay up or get up early iplayer to the rescue.

This brings me to protection and prevention of infection. Organized crime is trying to steal your credit card details and your identity, don’t question it just accept it. For the grand old price of DVD, sloppy people can be bought and traded on the black market and never know. There was a great bit of journalism on Radio 4 a while back that was well worth a listen called “Hacked to Pieces”, sadly its gone now but you will be glad to know you can watch the last 4 episodes of Eastenders. So anyway how do you protect yourself? Remember nothing on the internet is free, yes that’s right not free everyone everywhere wants something from you. So protect your browser, I use Firefox 3.5 with NoSCript (this allows you to only let trusted sites track you online and a lot more), sorry Bill its not that your browser is bad, its just that its the market leader and bad this gets the cyber criminal moist . Next use your common sense online, don’t try and install as much free stuff as you can get your hands on! Or you will just end up getting owned by a man in Estonia with a name you can’t pronounce who will then sell you to a man in Germany called Hanz, he will use you to buy his quota of computer parts in your name, buy a big laser and blow up your house. Now that’s common sense dealt with, onto protection and god forbid removal.

I hate the malevolent little criminals who write this garbage! Seriously, you buy a new PC and it looks the absolute beast of a machine in the shop but along comes the AV software and slows the whole thing to a grinding halt! Then comes the day that your best buddy, idiot that he may be sends you some pictures of his new car, and boom! your infected with some utter garbage and the AV that’s been actively scanning your PC for months making it run like a dog did nothing about it but tell you you’re now infected and that it cant get rid of it. Remind me why we pay £100’s for these things?

Now my machine is set up so that should this happen to me I can restore to a week old version of the OS, re-apply updates and Bobs your uncle. I use this True Image and a Segate external USB drive. However most people cant do that so here are some handy links I have found over the years, depending on how careless you are decide on your level of protection.

Free Installable Software

Comodo Internet Security Very good not too intrusive and quite good detection rates (Use this on my media pc).
ClamWin Very good detection rates, not intrusive at all but you need to kick of manual scans (But I like it that way, I use this).
AVG Free Very good but too intrusive although good detection rates.
Avast Very good but too intrusive although good detection rates, it does have an amazing feature of doing an offline scan as windows boots very good for getting rid of evil viruses.

Free online virus scan.

House Call (trendmicro)
Panda

Free Virus Removal Stuff.

Bitdefender’s Removal Tool Library
Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool
Mcafee Avert Stinger
SpyBot Search and Destroy

Hope you don’t become a commodity on the black market

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 19:23 and is filed under Technical Woffle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.