need a firewall

hi ppl

looking to know what the best firewall is as the 1 i am usin is hopeless also i have sum sort of spyware an internet explorer plugin it says but wen i delete it, it comes back 10 mins l8r and changes my settings. any ideas thanks

Reply to
the great yin
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On 23 Nov 2004 11:02:17 -0800, the great yin spoketh

The best firewall is the one you learn how to use.

Lars M. Hansen

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'badnews' with 'news' in e-mail address)

Reply to
Lars M. Hansen

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 18:22:58 -0400, Jason spoketh

Firewalls doesn't do a lot to keep spyware from getting installed. It may, if configured correctly, prevent such software from initializing communication with "mother". There's only one cure for spyware, and that's called "brains".

Lars M. Hansen

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'badnews' with 'news' in e-mail address)

Reply to
Lars M. Hansen
  • Lars M Hansen :

Which won't help them much seeing as removing spyware/adware seems to be giving them a hard time.

Jason

Reply to
Jason

What you describe leads to the conclusion that your system is compromised. Format the harddrive and resintall the operating system from clean media.

If a system is compromised, there is _no_ other safe way.

Wolfgang

Reply to
Wolfgang Kueter

Here are some instructions are written specifically for you as a home user. I'm assuming you have a single PC connected directly to a broadband modem and don't want to change that. I would not necessarily give the same advice to someone with more experience or someone in a non-home environment. I also realise that some of this is a bit off topic for a firewall group but you are probably not aware of that.

  1. If you don't have a virus scanner on that PC then download and install a free one such as:
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    make sure that it has done a full scan of the system. You must make sure that it is updated so that it knows about the latest viruses. A virus scanner which is never updated is useless. AVG will download updates for free.

When you've done that and when it no longer finds any viruses then move on to 2.

  1. Download and install a spyware remover such as this free one:
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    version 1.3 Make sure it gets the updates and make sure it checks for problems. When the check is complete tell it to fix the selected problems.
  2. Make sure you have all the critical updates from
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    must get the critical updates (sometimes called high priority updates) but you don't need to get updates other than critical updates unless you want them.
  3. Repeat from 1 until the virus scanner finds no viruses, the spyware remover finds no spyware and Windows update finds no critical or high priority updates.

You say that your firewall is hopeless? Which firewall is that? I suspect that your problems are caused by the myriad of security holes in Internet Explorer rather than anything to do with a firewall. Since your firewall has to allow Internet Explorer to work it may not be much help and you may not know how to configure it to stop malware making outbound connections. Consider using Internet explorer only when you have to (such as for Windows update) and a different browser for everything else such as:

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is a much better idea to avoid getting malware on the system in the first place rather than expecting a firewall to prevent it.

You must learn how to use your firewall and what it does. Otherwise it will certainly be hopeless. You may already know how to use Google or some other search engine to find the information you need. For example:

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There is no virus scanner which knows about all possible viruses and there is no adware/spyware remover which knows about all possible adware/spyware. So even after doing the above you still can't be sure that your system isn't compromised. The only way to do that is to format the drive and reinstall the operating system from a clean CD. One problem with this is that you should not connect the computer to the Internet until all critical updates have been installed. If you do then it may end up with more malware than you know what to do with before you have time to do anything else. So you also need a CD with all the updates on it as well as the install CD.

You should consider putting a hardware firewall between the modem and the PC instead of connecting the modem directly to the PC (unless the modem has a built in router). Then there is less need for an update CD before you go online to update a freshly installed PC using Windows update. A suitable device, which may be better described as a NAT router rather than a true firewall, costs about £50.

Jason

Reply to
Jason Edwards

That last line comes close to an insult. I rarely find people that have no brains, but even people with brains can be ignorant. Fortunately, brains are built to learn, so ignorance is curable.

As you point out, firewalls are not particularly effective at stopping spyware. Still 'the great yin' has asked for help, so we ought to either educate or ignore this reqeust.

I have found five practices that are effective at preventing spyware. First, only access the Internet from user accounts, not from an admin account. This is easy to configure from the Windows Control Panel (User Configuration). The second effective tool is Firefox (or Navigator, or Opera) because these are not tightly integrated with the Windows OS & they are not targeted as often as MSIE. However, I still need to use MSIE to go to the Windows Update site.

Third, I refuse to download anything that can be executable. No exes, even if they would provide desirable strippers dancing on my desktop. No bat files. I do occasionally download MS office files, but only if I have a reason to trust the source (e.g., I did download an Excel spreadsheet for safety reports from OSHA.)

Fourth, I have increased the security settings in MSIE (access via Tools menu/Internet Options... menu item/Security tab/ Internet button/Custom... button. The key here is to disable (or at least prompt) active content (.Net, ActiveX and Java).

Finally, I have chosen to run non-Windows operating systems whenever I can. But I don't expect that many find this an acceptable option. Still, there isn't much worry about spyware if you run Konqueror on patched OpenBSD.

These are all actionable steps that 'the great yin' can take to prevent spyware.

Reply to
shish-ka-bob

(Agreed so far) Except that I would do all the downloading and updating before actually pulling the plug on the network connection and going the work of finding and deleting the viruses, spyware offline. You may well still find some things that spybot search and destroy (for instance) has been unable to remove. If using W98 rerun everything in 'safe' mode. If still problems you should run Hijack this from:

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This will give you a list of applications running or suspicious registry keys which it can remove, however unless you are very experienced you should post the log to a forum such as:

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Where you will hopefully get advice as to how to remove the illegitimate items.

Then run everything again. Hopefully you will be clear. Go to windowsupdate, update everything again. Try not to log as a an member of the administrators group (XPpro, W2K NT4etc)

*Then* you can think about a firewall!
Reply to
jasee

A firewall will not stop spyware/malware from installing on your machine. Use Ad-Aware and SpyBot to rid your system of these unwanted programs.

Reply to
jch

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 02:58:08 GMT, shish-ka-bob spoketh

No insult was intended. I was merely pointing out that using a healthy dose of common sense when playing around on the internet is probably going to spare you more malware than any software solution that you install.

You other points are indeed good, and something that more people should live by...

Lars M. Hansen

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'badnews' with 'news' in e-mail address)

Reply to
Lars M. Hansen

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