Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Imminent.Threat.Contained

Free virus checkers and anti-spyware progz aren't always the most effective tools for purging your system of a malicious visitor. I realised that I'd somehow contracted some sort of spyware / trojan hybrid over the last two days. I blame MySpace. I never did trust that site. You see, Zach - I told you there was a reason I didn't use it ^L^

Well, AVG is usually pretty good, especially for a free virus checker / quarantine programme. Coupled with LavaSoft AdAware and SpyBot: Search & Destroy, keeping one's system workably clean doesn't usually take much effort at all. However, when one makes a stupid mistake and allows something nasty to infect and begin to work its hoodoo, these free-to-download anti-nasty-stuff applications don't cleanse your system of everything - especially when something is running in the background and repeatedly reopens itself to prevent expulsion.

That's where root system security access and base protocol manual locating and extracting comes into play. Of course, the programmes tell you that they've quarantined every existent threat, but the truth of the matter is, no matter how many system resets you do, or how many times you run all three programmes adjacent to each other (one could also add something like ClamWin into the mix, just to balance the whole anti-virus and anti-spyware conglomeration), some things are just so annoying that they refuse to be scraped off and washed down the sink.

Perhaps if I didn't have a background of growing up in the 90's (pre-DirectX) where batch programmes, exiting to DOS and pkzipping to ten floppy disks was the norm, I wouldn't have learned as much, nor kept as much of an interest, as I have now and been able to run this user-friendly environment as administrator in safe mode with command prompt, deleted the guilty files and run regedit to completely discard any evidence that trojan.hatesyou.fornoreason had ever existed and been allowed to run its course for a steady 24 hours.

My trust is still in black screens with white lettering.

-Timotheos
Exorcism.complete

3 comments:

ankurindia said...

most of peoples in my town uses avg. so i guess its most populor .

K_tigress said...

Humm those are interesting choices on antiviral programs. What's your favorite in terms of Firewalls?

Geckomayhem said...

Indeed. This space of cyber capacities is not called the World Wide Web for naught.

-Timotheos