I helped clean my Dad’s computer of various critters, spyware, worms and trojans this afternoon. It’s incredible how fast they collect. It doesn’t help that he’s stubborn about some things and forgetful of directions. But he’s my dad, so…I keep trying to figure out why “everything” is so “slow”. I hate how opaque most processes are on Win2k, where you’ve got to examine several registry locations, task manager, google results, and make your guesses.
Anyway, the funny thing is that we got clued into some of what was going on because his McAfee firewall (which hadn’t previously done anything useful I was aware of) started alerting him that something was trying to send out packets…and it didn’t take long from there to identify some malware called GoodFriends chunking away. I used Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, which is dynamite, and ran a full McAfee scan, turning up a few more baddies.
Inspired by this illuminating exercise, I decided to pony up and buy a fresh copy of McAfee, since my year ran out recently and I’ve lost my taste for stale DATs. Given how many different networks I’ve been exposing my laptop to lately, I sprang for the $59 combo AV+firewall to see what turns up. Well, the AV found nothing of interest, but the firewall does have a GUI for the firewall, and get this feature: as soon as I connected by dialup tonight, it showed me events that were pings incoming, with the option to accept/deny, etc. But the best part is you can map the source: it puts up a map and draws the lines, showing where, the registrant info, etc. Incredibly fun. Not very useful. But fun.
So maybe entertainment is the best way to deal with hackers. Especially once you begin to see all the different ways they are poking at you in the dark.
I want to clarify that I cannot fully endorse the McAfee product: their aggressive and relentless marketing even from within their own products (that you just paid for) strikes me as retrading the deal. And their zeal at scaring you with all the ways you could get hacked and violated makes me want to shower. But then again, if you’ve ever used Norton…well, it’s workable.
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