Safe computing

In the last two months I have been priveleged (cursed) to endure the task of cleaning bugs off of an XP computer. The first machine was infected by several trojans via e-mail transmission and the second machine which I am still working on is so infected with trojans, spyware, malware etc that it has taken me several days to finally get control over it. It has taken me several days because I have been working on this workstation in between other tasks.

How do I know that this workstation is infested? The user told me that one of her nieces or nephews downloaded a lot of junk off the Internet and gummed up her computer. By the time she noticed this the computer was completely useless. At boot up I noticed several Internet Explorer pages that started up and went to some sort of advertisement web site. The problem really manifested itself when I tried to install a new version of Norton Anti Virus and then plugged in a network cable into the NIC.

Just as soon as the pc obtained an IP address IE fired up about 20 web pages and then a server busy dialog box popped up. There were so many web pages loading on this computer that it completely locked up the system. All available cpu cycles were being taken up because of multiple requests to open a web broswer and the RAM on the system was quickily overwhelmed which made the computer all the more slower.

The number one symptom of a problem on this computer was the fact that Norton Anti Virus was sending notifications in the system tray telling us that the program was not longer active with current virus definition files. That means that this particular computer was wide open and unprotected. Trojans, viruses, spyware, malware, hijackers etc all have several things in common.

A. they eat up all available resources on the infected machine
B. some of them try to take control of your computer
C. hijackers take control over your web browser and redirects you to other infected web sites
D. they can destroy your valuable data
E. they can use network shares to infect other data on servers
F. They can steal your valuable personal information and send it over the Internet to a website for collection.

The list goes on and on folks. It is imperative that you keep a registered and up to date Anti Virus software and spyware protection on your computer. Having a firewall that alerts you to applications that attempt to make connections to the Internet can be very useful as well.