[at-l] Virus Advice Please (OT)

[jbullar1 at twcny.rr.com (Jim Bullard)]

At 10:18 AM 12/12/2004 -0500, Steve Landis wrote:
>On 12/12/2004 1:29 AM, RoksnRoots@aol.com wrote:
>
>>         Yesterday someone sent me an e-mail.
>>         Today I received the same subject line from that e-mail in 
>> another e-mail from the awful-sounding JumpingJennyjkhz. It was a 
>> mortgage offer spam.
>>       AT-L posters addresses are popping up on my "buddy list" 
>> involuntarily.
>>
>>             Advice anyone?   (No I haven't virus scanned or have such a 
>> thing)
>
>Help!  A burglar came to my front door, knocked and I let him in.  Now my 
>stuff is gone.  Also, more burglars are now knocking on my door. What 
>should I do?  BTW, I also leave my door unlocked.
>
>Advice you requested...
>
>1. Firewall -  Free 
>http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp

Zone Alarm is an excellent firewall but you should check with your ISP 
before installing it. It works too well with some ISP software. In my case 
it blocked *EVERYTHING*. I couldn't reach the net, get e-amil , nothing, 
nada, zilch. My ISP has a firewall on their server and I get CA's EZ 
Firewall (and anti-virus) free as part of my service. Moral, some problems 
are the result of interaction between ISP security and local machine security.

>2. Virus Protection $ http://tinyurl.com/6rehu
>3. Spyware Detection - Free
>http://www.lavasoft.com/software/adaware/
>http://spybot.safer-networking.de/en/mirrors/index.html
>4. IM - Trillian - Free http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/downloads/
>5. Leave AOHell
>6. Use a browser that isn't IE - Free
>Firefox 1.0 http://tinyurl.com/457b3
>NS 7.2 http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download_fullinstall.jsp

I run IE for only 3 reasons 1) MS insured that I couldn't get rid of it by 
"integrating" it into the OS (Grrrr!) 2) I use it occasionally to check how 
my web site will look to IE users before uploading pages to my host and 3) 
MS won't let me download Windows updates through a competing browser 
(Grrr!). Except for those downloads my firewall is set to allow NO ACCESS 
between IE and the Internet.

>This is just what I do, YMMV.
>
>Your Buddy Steve

All good advice though I wouldn't bother with any IM software but that's my 
prejudice. I intensely dislike IM and chat.