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Part 4 - Adware and Spyware

In Part 3 of this series I stressed importance of having an anti-virus package installed on your PC, and extreme importance of keeping it current with updates from publisher of package. Unfortunately, many people who do appreciate need for such precautions fail to make an important distinction — one which leaves them exposed to threats they mistakenly believe they are protected against.

You see, while a good anti-virus program can detect and deal with many variations on virus/trojan/worm theme, it can't handle all variations. An anti-virus program is a good start, but you can't stop there. Into your defensive line-up you must add a few more specialized scanner-type programs to catch some of threats anti-virus program can't handle.

It is beyond scope of this short article to delve into differences between virus, trojan, worm, adware and spyware — nor is an understanding of characteristics of each necessary in order to effectively combat them. For more curious reader, my security Bible "The Hacker’s Nightmare" deals with all threat types in some detail. It is however necessary to appreciate that:

(a) All variations are extremely prevalent; (b) There are differences between each type of threat; (c) There can be further (sometimes significant) variations within each category; (d) There is no single antidote that will protect you against all of above.

You may recall from Part 3 that, for average home and small business computer, I generally recommend against all-in-one security suites that purport to protect you from a multiplicity of threats, so in that context point (d) above is a valid observation. For my reasons for that recommendation please refer to previous part in this series.

Don’t worry! The fact that we need several somewhat similar programs in our arsenal isn't going to impact bank balance to any significant degree. As I pointed out in previous article, many of very best solutions in this threat category are quite free. That's even more fortunate than it at first seems. While programs I use and recommend are extremely effective, they aren't perfect. Sometimes you need to install two competing programs of same type, because often one will catch intrusions that other won't, and vice versa. These programs are invariably quite small and don't place any significant load on computer, so extra protection is very worthwhile. A good example of this multi-application recommendation is adware/spyware detection.

While it has it's quirks and it does look a bit rough, in my opinion most effective software solution of all against adware & spyware is a product called Spybot-S&D (S&D stands for "Search & Destroy") from PepiMK Software. Spybot is free to both commercial and home users.

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Part 2 – Shoring Up Your Browser

In Part 1 of this series I gave you some "homework" reading. If you followed up on that recommendation you have already had a glimpse of some of things we'll discuss in this part. If you didn't do so back then, I urge you to read that article before continuing: http://hackersnightmare.com/FreeContent/Browser_Wars.pdf

Now, there simply isn’t space available here to get into specifics of various browser brands and versions so, where specifics are at all necessary, I'm going to restrict this article to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Despite inroads made by competitors such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer is still choice (even if by default) of 90% of worlds Internet-using population. No matter whose survey figures you choose to believe, it's somewhere around that number. Even so, while fine detail may differ, general warnings and recommendations herein apply to all browser brands.

As computer programs become more and more complex, likelihood of errors somewhere in thousands – even millions – of lines of programming code becomes so high as to be almost guaranteed. Obviously it is thus essential that there be some way to correct any errors that may be discovered after program has been released. The method of doing so is referred to as "applying patches and/or updates". Broadly speaking, we can say that patches fix "broken things", while updates add new functionality. In either case it is usually a simple process of downloading a small corrective file and running it to apply fix/update to main browser program.

Unfortunately, if they think about it at all, millions of browser users world over take position "if it works, why mess with it?". Their browser gets them around Internet and that's all they want of it. But they are giving no thought to what is happening behind scenes; to what advantage is being taken of "broken things" they haven't bothered to patch.

A great example of dangers of such complacency can be found in a short article from USA Today that is actually more to do with firewalls (which we will look at in Part 7 of this series). I urge you to read this article now, paying particular attention to fact that malicious exploits mentioned were all targeted at, and made possible by, known flaws in Internet Explorer – flaws for which a patch was available but had not been applied. Please do read this article before continuing: http://hackersnightmare.com/FreeContent/Other/HoneyPots.pdf

Patches were available to plug holes that were exploited by MS Blaster and Sasser worms (as described in above article) even before those attacks took place. It was sheer number of unpatched Internet Explorer installations globally that allowed those very costly and near-catastrophic attacks to take place at all. Instead of going off with a bang that was heard around world and echoed in all mainstream media, they should have resulted in nothing more than a fizzle.