Annalivia Ford

During the holiday upswing in "help me, my account is sending email I didn't send!" tickets, I wrote a post that had some ideas for mitigation of the endless cycle of end user -> cracked 'Doze machine -> spam the world. I had intended to continue that post and got sidetracked, but last night was reading the saga of a guy I know who is amazingly smart and knows a whole lot about computers and internet stuff, and yet is having a huge amount of trouble locating the source of the spam coming from his home network. Seriously, if this guy can't get rid of a bot, no-one can, and what is the average population going to be able to do?

According to anecdotal evidence and an informal poll of non-geeks I know, the answer is overwhelmingly "I didn't know that (bot infestation) was possible/it is that bad?/you can't be serious!" or "throw the machine away and get a new one." Ack! Would you get in a car and drive it without knowing how, without a license, or without putting on your seat-belt? (I know there are some who would, but I'm ignoring you, you delinquents!) Would you just drive it into the ground without ever giving it maintenance?

Not to belabor the obvious, but Windows has security issues. Lots of them. Microsoft does release patches for its software. Patch your machines regularly. Having a Mac does not make you invulnerable, either. A hacker took down a fully patched Macbook at CanSecWest in 2 seconds flat. Regardless, not having those patches is worse than having them.

If you've got Windows, be sure you have this patch. A couple of PC scans that I like are from Panda Security, Kaspersky Lab, and Trend Micro.

Anti-virus software is not an optional accessory these days. I spent a lot of money on my computer; $40 a year to protect it doesn't seem like an unreasonable investment to me - after all, I pay for insurance on my car, don't I? There are good free AV programs out there, too. AVG and Avast are two of them. Any anti-virus software is useless unless updated regularly.

There are literally tens of thousands of new exploits and threats discovered every day. No joke. There are all sorts of software available for use to scan your computer for malware; but be careful! Many of them are traps for the unwary that use social engineering to get a person to download them. They are either malware themselves, or a nice little con game that tells you you have been infected with malware that it installed itself on the sly, and now you have to pay to get it removed: ransomware. My chosen suite of applications has served me well: SpyWareBlaster, SpyBot S&D, and MalwareBytes along with the enterprise anti-virus have kept my machine largely free of infestation. They're useless unless updated regularly.

The Internets used to be more fun before all this fiddling was necessary, didn't they?