The importance of scanning for malware more often.

[Teho]

Something interesting happened to me yesterday. While at work, an SMS beeped in to my mobile, from my ISP. Reading: "Your internet access has been restricted due to suspicious and irregular traffic."

Oh crap. Have they started cracking down on filesharing all of a sudden? They've always been pretty cool about that before. So I phoned them up immediately of course. The guy I spoke to said that they've noticed a lot of traffic going out to other computers, that appears to be like that of a spambot. So they'd blocked my computer from accessing SMTP and FTP servers. So I explained that that's not very likely, that I got a pretty up to date virus-checker (Avast) and shouldn't be able to be infected with such things. And then I flat out told him that I'm a filesharer, using torrents quite a bit. So that there's traffic going out to a lot of other machines isn't strange at all. His response? "Ah, cool. I'll just remove the block then."

Did not bat an eyelid. I love my ISP.

Anyhow, when I got home I did think that I hadn't scanned my computer for malware in a while, and might as well go ahead and do that just to be safe (the guy I spoke with had asked me to do that as well). So I fired up Ad-Aware.

"The currently installed definitions are 241 days old, would you like to update them?"

Er..oops. Ok I guess.. *click*

So, some updating and a scan later, I was staring at the result in disbelief. "found 1 W32.trojan.spambot"

I hate spammers. With a passion. I think there should be a special place in hell reserved for spammers. A very special place. And now one of the bastards has been using MY comp to spread their crap around, just because I got lazy with protecting myself from it.

This is going to give me nightmares for half of an eternity, I just know it. Don't start trusting that your virus-scanner and firewall will stop everything (though you'd think they would, wouldn't you?), and forget to scan your computers for this crap every now and then. Apparently it's as important as it ever was.

[Demon Cleaner]

My father did no scans and got the malware Zapchast on his PC. I managed to lock it, but it's still lurking on his PC until I find a method to remove it completely.

[Harrison]

Spammer trojans seems to be the biggest thing going around at the moment. It's what the hacker kept putting on the classicamiga server when it was being hacked! The server stats showed over 50,000 emails managed to be sent via the server before we managed to catch it had been hacked and block it!

Virus, trojan, spyware, malware... call it what you will, but it is all coming from the same scum bent on making our lives a misery. I learnt the hard way years ago that you need to keep your virus scanner up to date and working as I contracted a very nasty virus that infected every exe file on my system and a complete system format was the only way to remove it. Since then I've been very good at maintaining my virus checker, firewall, spyware definitions etc...

And although I have a spyware scanner running all the time as part of Outpost and it automatically updates its definitions I don't fully trust it to catch everything. Once a month I like to run a full system scan using Spyware Doctor. I used to use Adaware but it doesn't seem to catch them all compared to Spyware Doctor. I am paranoid though so actually scan the whole system with both!

[LowercaseE]

I try to run my spy-ware scanners regularly but often time I just get lazy and forget. I do keep fairly recent backups of my installed software but all my mp3's and games are just too much to backup and I'd be pxssed if I lost those.

[Demon Cleaner]

I also run Spybot from time to time, once a month or so, but it doesn't find anything special, well, until now, I hope this will stay like this.

[J T]

I've been pretty slack with this too recently (a mixture of laziness and complacency I guess).

Probably I should be more careful as I've downloaded a lot of, uh, stuff recently

[Submeg]

Hmm, I should really invest in a proper version of Ad-Aware or Spybot. Which is better? I am actually going to have to buy the sucker

[Harrison]

Neither are the best any longer. I currently recommend Spyware Doctor. It's a commercial scanner but it is the best one around at the moment.

But do you think I actually purchased it? Just download the trial version and crack it!

[Submeg]

I meant to say Spyware Doctor :P

[Demon Cleaner]

I already heard good things about Spyware Doctor, maybe it's time to switch. Found torrent, d/l now... I saw that it is from PC Tools, I already have Registry Mechanic, which is a great program to keep your PC clean.