patndoris' blog

For those of you who live here in the States, you’ve likely seen the commercial from one of the well known insurance companies, where the very nice gentleman describes how the unsuspecting person, while deep-frying his Thanksgiving turkey, had the cooker blow up his shed. Or the one for On Star, where a loyal customer is in an accident, and the compassionate agent is quickly going to send help. But what protection do you have when a computer crisis strikes?

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I like to imagine I’m on the cutting edge (…oh be quiet and let me dream will you?) So I was quite pleased when I got buzzed the other day at work and our V.P says "Hey - would you like to see a cool virus?" And of course my answer took less than a split second "Sure!"

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Agent 007, you have been assigned Mission Possible. Should you choose to accept it, your goal is to search out and destroy the truly nasty of the nastiest malware on your computer. This mission is easier than you think with Spybot Search & Destroy in your bag of tricks.

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HiJackThis (HJT) is a free downloadable program used to detect browser hijackers. It can be a useful tool in finding bad things that have somehow sneaked onto your computer. It produces a rather ominous looking report (which you’ve likely seen posted in forums where people are asking for assistance with a problem) that has become almost a staple when troubleshooting an issue is required and/or systems are behaving a bit oddly when they used to function fine. I highly recommend learning how to manually analyze these logs. In addition to providing you some tools for doing this, I’ll also offer up a couple of shortcuts to make it a wee bit less painful.

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Moving forward with my happy little campaign on cleaning up your machine (and keeping it clean) I will talk (and talk, and talk) about spyware. You have (ahem...no doubt) read my previous entry on what spyware is, so I will skip the intro and get to it.

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A firewall is the first line of defense to keeping your computer clean. In the simplest of terms - it keeps bad stuff out. A firewall can be a built in to a piece of hardware (such as a router) or a software program, but you must have one and it must be on all of the time.

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