Some (obvious) advice

**MissDevil** · 26th April 2006, 01:17 AM

i like the zone alarm firewall

**spearmaster** · 26th April 2006, 07:28 AM

McAfee and Norton are much heavier applications which consume more of your resources. There are many other virus checkers out there, such as some of the places I suggested, which are not only less resource-intensive, but in fact respond much more quickly to new viruses and trojans.

If you have McAfee or Norton, there's nothing wrong with them. But if you don't already have something, don't rush out and buy either of these products, simply a waste of money.

**tennis_balls** · 26th April 2006, 07:50 AM

McAfee now comes free with Comcast internet........otherwise it would be overpriced IMHO

**NoMouthToScream** · 26th April 2006, 08:02 AM

As for keyloggers, you need to intercept the programs as outgoing traffic, for this I would suggest some type of firewall program that detects and allows you to modify outgoing traffic as you see fit. Programs such as ZoneAlarm are good at this task. Once the programs are stopped in their tracks you need to get a good anti virus program. As suggested above, trendmicro's housecall and AVG are two good free anti virus services.

**spearmaster** · 26th April 2006, 08:14 AM

Originally Posted by tennis_balls

McAfee now comes free with Comcast internet........otherwise it would be overpriced IMHO

LOL, guess you can't argue about that.

You can also check your ISP - some of them implement virus-checking for emails passing through their servers, thus removing some potential problems. Some may do spam filtering, which may also reduce your risk of exposure to viruses - but you could also potentially miss some important emails, and especially if you are signed up with a number of casinos.

Norton and McAfee also have Internet security suites, which you should carefully check the settings of. I don't remember what the default is but as far as I can recall they may be set a bit too aggressively.

**Simmo!** · 27th April 2006, 11:52 AM

I downloaded a free firewall called "Sygate Personal Firewall" yesterday from the PCWorld website. I see ZoneAlarm is now a commercial offering with all that misleading "fee download" crap simply giving you a 30 day trial version.

In fact "Sygate" is now owned by Symantec so even that is now commercial, however PCWorld have version 5.6 which is still the "free for personal use" edition:

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/fil...id,8132,00.asp

I also found some new trojans on my PC. Apparently these are very new and not all AV software has caught up yet (my AVG hadn't). Also very prevalent. If you want to check, go to c:\windows\system32 and look for the following:

taskdir.exe
phqghume.exe
parad.raw.exe
internetoloper.exe

Also some of these download .csv and .xml files containing data storage locations. If you see things like "win[xx].xml" and "svcp.csv" with similar date/time stamps as the above files, remove these. Incidentally, if you see a file "wpa.dbl" that appears with a similar timestamp, dont delete this one - it's legit!

All the above can be removed (apart from wpa.dbl), though I'd suggest you recycle bin them first just to make sure your system doesnt need them. I renamed mine and the system rebooted and runs fine. Quicker in fact as "taskdir.exe" is a real memory hog.

Cheers

Simmo!

**spearmaster** · 27th April 2006, 02:24 PM

Sygate is quite good - I used it for a few years before I had to reformat...

Another one to try is Bullguard - I believe there's a trial version but you will have to subscribe in the end. You get firewall, virus protection, and lots of online file storage which I think is a great idea.

I'm testing it now (thanks to the developer) for possible deployment in Asia... would like to see how it works for others.

**drhuynh** · 27th April 2006, 08:48 PM

Trojan/Backdoor/Key-loggers can be installed into your computer mainly in 2 ways:

1. Somebody directly attacks you on the Internet. To prevent this, a firewall like ZoneAlarm can be used to keep the attackers at bay.

2. Attackers exploit a 3rd party application like a mail attachment, browser vulnerabilities, instant messenger security holes,... Firewall ususally doesn't stop this type of attack. Most of the time, the malicious program is already installed on your computer. However, if the firewall is a good one, it will pick up the bad guy when he tries to phone home. But the fact is, the malicious program is already there on your computer. For this limitation of firewall, that's why we need antivirus software. Antivirus software may not stop the attacker from attacking but will stop him from installing malicious program on your machine as long as it recognize the pattern/signature of the program.

For those Intrustion Prevension program like PrevX(I have a change to work with them on this: http://secunia.com/advisories/15885/), PivX, Mcafee Intercept. They are not functioning exactly like a antivirus software but using a heuristic method to detect backdoors. They are there because of the fact new backdoors/keyloggers being released everyday, the antivirus sometimes is not that up-to-date and may oversee the risk.

In conclusion, you need both a firewall and a antivirus to be safe.

**GrandMaster** · 28th April 2006, 12:26 AM

Originally Posted by Simmo!

I downloaded a free firewall called "Sygate Personal Firewall" yesterday from the PCWorld website. I see ZoneAlarm is now a commercial offering with all that misleading "fee download" crap simply giving you a 30 day trial version.

The free version is still there. Maybe it is not advertised as prominently as the commercial versions, but it is there.