Death to spyware!

PC Magazine’s recent article “A False Sense of Security” gives some sobering stats on just how badly infected and malware abused the average American PC is. I’m pretty sure that this applies to many other netizens’ systems, too.

Read it for a sobering wake up call. Then make certain you have installed, up to date, resident-in-memory antivirus, firewall, and antispyware software.

My favorite suite is Norton Internet Security. It’s one of PC Mag’s too, along with Editors’ Choice Zone Alarm Security Suite. Either is highly recommended.

If you can’t dig up a few dollars for one of those two, you can still install sufficient, albeit somewhat feature-limited, free AV and firewall software. Click here to read my previous post on hardening your wireless network which includes links to personal editions of AntiVir and Zone Alarm.

One thing neither of the suites nor the AntiVir+Zone Alarm freebie route provides is reasonable spyware/adware detection and removal. A year or two ago many people thought such a thing unnecessary. PC Mag’s “Antispyware” sidebar and reviews prove otherwise. Their recommendations boil down to two picks:

• Webroot Spy Sweeper is their Editors Choice
• Freely available Spybot is still pretty good, especially as a secondary tool backing up Spy Sweeper

Wanna save some scratch if you can get away with it? Combine Spybot with Webroot’s free Spy Audit tool and you’ll only have to buy Spy Sweeper when the audit turns up something Spybot missed.

Here’s how. First, download and install Spybot (click here to access the download page). Once you have it installed, be sure you check for any updates and turn on its “Immunize” function. Then run a scan by clicking on “Check for Problems”. If you have spyware on your sysem, you’ll see a list of the problems and be able to remove them by selecting the “Fix selected…” button. If all goes well, after you’ve fixed all of the issues and re-run the scan you may still see incorrect Spybot flagging of “DSO Exploit” issues such as:

I say “may still see incorrect Spybot flagging” because if you have the latest OS updates for your PC (you do run Windows Update on every box with Windoze, don’t you?), you should have already installed patches from MS for the potential DSO exploits. Spybot still (incorrectly) reports the problem, however, maybe in a case of being overcautious. (You can configure these warnings “off” if you like; see Spybot docs for more on how to do that.)

After you’re run Spybot and removed all of the issues it can find and treat, download and run Spy Audit. While Spy Audit executes it looks something like:

then it will load the results of its scan in a Web page (you’ll need to allow Internet access via your firewall for this to work). If Spybot has done its job very well, you’ll see:

Celebrate if you see ‘0’ in all of the columns!

More likely, you’ll see at least some adware cookies. You can temporarily flush those via your browser’s cookie deletion or clear option, then re-run Spy Audit to see if it returns a clean bill of health. Pleae note however that many of these cookies may be loaded onto your system again at some future time. To curtail them, you need to either limit cookie abilities in your browser or install stronger antispyware.

If you need to go the latter route to get rid of remaining cookies or spyware, pick up a copy of Spy Sweeper. It’s not perfect, but PC Mag believes it to be the best option we have right now short of running Linux (ok, I added that Linux part, couldn’t help myself).

Good luck and death to all spyware!