Network Attacks!

I don't use a AV product (cept for the odd weekly scan with Clamwin which gets updates itself daily and is free). Found them to be reource hogs and an absolute bitch to remove. The odd scan with Adaware or Spybot and i'm clean.

I don't open attachments from unknown people and use Opera for browsing, i can say in the last 10 yrs i only got hit with a virus once. Yahoo gets my mail and if it look ok in my browser i use YPops to get it into Outlook which Clamwin protects also. Zonealarm has been my firewall of choice from many years and its kept 99% of worms off my box.

Another tip i could share is to use a comphrehensive hosts list. These guys have a pretty good one for global ad servers. I used the hosts list in conjunction with a program called edexter that's a little webserver that displays any pics of ur choice in place of the ad. Lots of viruses got spread through a JPEG handling explot in IE some time ago.

A nice side effect is very fast browsing even on a 32k line in Opera with images turned off.


Of course i'm the sole user on my machine, i guess it could get trickier if ur machine is shared with other members of the family (often times clueless), then all bets are off. Your machine will get infected no matter what you do. Best to get them their own machine and firewall yourself from them 😉

i agree totally with u...it just takes a bit of sensible browsing, nothing much...

Originally posted by coolbuddy_79@Jul 19 2005, 08:08 PM
@vebmetal...

i do have quite a bit of knowledge about spyware or adware...i almost can look at the task manager and tell if something is wrong with my system 🙄

also, i do scan my PC with anti-spywares quite often, and especially if i feel something is wrong with it... 🙂

also, i don't do much in my PC, other than downloading and watching movies 😉
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Heh, a few years ago I would agree that what you do is sufficient... but after being a victim of some particularly nasty and hard to get rid of trojans and spyware, I don't have much confidence in just looking at the tast manager... for e.g. I got a trojan that managed to inject itself into some windows related DLLs, and so nothing abnormal came in the taskmanager.. it's ony when I installed a firewall that I noticed that some windows processes were transferring a bunch of data even though they had no business connecting to the any external entity...... till date I have not been able to completely get rid of this damn trojan, but I have been able to heavily sedate it courteousy of the firewall to an extent where it cannot connect to anything without first getting my permission, and also by diabling a bunch of services that were clearly trojan related.... (p.s. none of the major anti-spywares were able to clean it, and most didn't even detect it).....

p.s. I don't know if this is an increasingly normal phenomenon or not, but mroe and more movies that I have downloaded have turned out to be blank or worse, they turn out to be viruses.....

well, then i'd say u were not browsing safe...which is the first step of defence i take 😛

eh... perhaps... but I also think the age of passive viruses is over... Viruses will hit you through your ISP's network, they will appear on "trusted" sites sometimes when someone hacks into them - basically they are designed to hunt.Well good luck to you... it's your machine - I just think your machine is not as safe as you think it is.

Viruses/Trojans nowadays want to connect back to the mother ship so it can send some spam. OR be enrolled into someone's DDOS network. Destroying your machine is not very useful for them. Better to keep it alive without you knowing anything about them.

So simplest thing to do in a cmd prompt window (w.o any firewalls) is

netstat -an

This will show you all connections that are being made from your box. If you do this b4 your internet activity and see some connections being made that you did not initiate, then you got company. Or you could do it at the end, just close all internet apps and see what's still connected.

Cleaning stuff up is not always easy, some trojans are very nasty as you said.

Spyware Info is a useful site and they offer these instructions for safe browsing.

thx for everything dudes.. I ain't having any network attacks anymore..Thx ... Respect!Reasons:1. Migrated to XP pro with SP22. Trashed Kaspersky beta 2k6 since it hogged system resources and switched to NOD32 AV.. and tell ya what, I'm glad I made the switch.NOD32 is an alternative to Norton, infact even better, 'xcept it does'nt use that much system resources.

Originally posted by GAURAV7777@Jul 13 2005, 09:37 PM
almost forgot

atleast it tells people which exploit is being targeted than the zone alarm which just gives the technical info



Zone alarm security suite is good and if set to auto determine then fine. Also ZA Suite comes with AV and Anti-Spyware!