Be Careful Of Spyware

[1nf4r3d]

Hey people....make sure youve got a decent firewall/antispyware program for when your searching for torrents.....ive noticed alot of alarms on my system over the past few years as im searching the many and vast torrent sites......There are a few really bitchy things that will ultimatly make you reformat your computer....ive done 17 in the last 6 months for family and friends .........just make sure you are doing your scanning once a week or more ...if possible set it up so it runs for you.........well thats my 2 cents :P ......oh and everybody ...remember to seed

[cassie]

An alternative would be to install and configure a program - such as Ad-Aware - to run (real-time) 24/7, in the background, along with a good antivirus. That way, you could diminish your in-depth scans a bit.

[Dark_Shroud]

I find adaware to be lacking these days. A good AV like MSE seems to catch everything. I also use Spybot SD's immunization feature. Just a weekly scan with Malwarebyte's Anti-malware and/or Super Anti-spyware should do fine, both have a free version.

[kluelos]

Both of those turn out to be helpless in the face of actual infection. The first thing they both want to do is "phone home" to check for updates. If the attacker has disabled this, they screech to a halt with an incomprehensible error message. MBAM in particular should know better but doesn't, and has gone off to waste its efforts on pointless IP blacklisting, earning complete discommendation. Avoid it completely.

This is a weakness of all web-based AV software, btw. They assume you can access the web. Learned this lesson the hard way, and am a fan of DrWeb's CureIt these days. Update it every so often as part of your monthly maintenance.

[Vasy]

Avira has a manual update feature (a small file ,~25mB, that you could get on a flash drive from a friend..), and the av is free. If I recall correctly, it detects ~96% of the viruses in some reviews I read, compared with norton at ~82% and kaspersky at 97%.

[kluelos]

This assumes you have such a friend -- assumes that you have X external resource, or Y external resource, without ever checking if that's a realistic expectation at all, or providing an alternative if it turns out not to be so in any given situation.

It's a deep design flaw to critically depend on something external that you can't even say will reliably be there.

[Vasy]

Unless the nearest neighbor is 100 miles away, that feature can help you, and you can install it without an internet connection. Another way to avoid IP blacklisting, would be a p2p update feature, like a torrent, but that's not perfect as the tracker itself can be blacklisted and requires that you still have a working internet connection.

[1nf4r3d]

alls i know for sure is theres a few strains of virtumonde (spyware) that is so hard to remove that unless you flash your ram and bios...with reformat ...will come back also there are a few really bad anativirus viruses that are just as hard to remove ...... ive had to put a an infected hard drive into another pc just to be able to format it because that option wasnt working on the infected pc........the makers of this crap are certainly getting creative these days....ill give them props there ...lol....my point is....i tried everything i could get my hands on avira, kapersky , maleware bytes, spybot s&d, and so on.......none of these can even detect anything wrong once you have said viruses :blink:

[kluelos]

Those assumptions ARE the design flaw.