One of the great joys of staying with relatives for the holidays is having their spyware-ridden, barely-working home computers as your only way to connect to the internet!
This machine is a real beauty - so much spyware that both SpyBot and AdAware can’t even complete their scans without freezing and eventually crashing, a BILLION fucking icons in the system tray…ctrl+alt+delete causes the entire system to freeze for 10 minutes, and when it finally pops up, the CPU is hovering at 100% (occasionally dipping down to 99%) with NO PROGRAMS INTENTIONALLY RUNNING. When you actually get firefox working, the entire browser window is choked with “helpful” add-on toolbards, search helpers, popup blockers (that mysteriously keep popping shit up onto the screen, freezing the browser while they tell me all about how they can block stuff that I don’t want popping up) to the point where there’s about a 2.5" by 3" visible square of the page that you’re browsing. One of the “helpful” add-on toolbars was so insulted that I went to Google instead of using the toolbar to do a search that it popped up a gigantic arrow pointing to its own search window that completely froze the computer to the point where two or three reboots were required before it would even start up without going into safe mode. Hooray!
Please, for the love of God, maintain your home computers. You wouldn’t fill your car with water or lasagna, and you don’t try to store clean clothes in the oven - why are people so completely CLUELESS to the point of complete destruction when it comes to their home PC’s?!?!?
My sister in law was over a few weeks ago and mentioned she was getting DSL for Christmas and wanted my advice. I happened to have an unopened firewall around the house (yes, I’m a geek) so I gave it to her, told her the basics of how to set it up, to get a decent anti-virus package, and call me if there were any issues.
She called this week, because her know-it-all father told her she didn’t have DSL because the computer was connected to the phone line, she didn’t need the firewall box since she was running Windows, and that antivirus packages are a waste of money, never mind the fact that I recommended a free one.
Believe me, I feel your pain, and have to do the same surgery for my friends. But just how are they to know if their computers are infected? How are the casual users to know what is “normal” and what is not? Sometimes even I’m puzzled, and I have worked with PCs for 30 years, with a technical background.
So their computers are slow. How do they know what speed is “normal”? How do they know that the disk activity is excessive? The CPU is overburdened?
Go ahead and run the AdAware, but when the malware counter gets to 20, stop the process and delete those, then run it over again. Do this until the system is clean, and it shouldn’t freeze up.
I always tell my clients, “Mr or Mr averagecomputeruser: It is a jungle out there, and you are purposely connecting a big pipeline from your computer to there, protection is needed”
It is indeed tempting to always blame the users for getting infected, but I have seen already many users that were protected and the bastard spy ware and virus creators are finding ways to get around.
The most dastardly ones are the ones that install by looking to the users as a security warning, AFAIK there are already laws banning the practice, but they are hard to enforce.
Yep, I have relatives and friends call about this crap every week. I try to teach them some basic housekeeping stuff, but few want to keep up with it. Can’t really blame them, but unfortunately that’s the net for you.
It’s cool though, if I have to sit there a few hours cleaning shit up, reinstalling or updating stuff, etc, my friends will usually throw me a few bucks/beers/home-cooked meal. Being single, I’ll take the meal any day.
I treasure my visits to my Dad’s computer. He’s retired and only got a PC four or five years ago. Initially it was lifetime-worst-ever-support-hell, but he has become a total demon these days. It just takes patience with a loved one, and some judicious advice with browser and protection, and they’ll get it sussed eventually. Now he runs a Linux partition for shits and giggles (he’s a tinkerer at heart and really likes fannying about with stuff), and is currently helping test version 0.2 of Songbird. My Dad! hug
As seen on Rape the Web:
“Yes, a double firewall. Dude, a wireless broadband connection without a firewall is like fucking a $20 hooker without a condom.”
“So…are you saying I should or I shouldn’t, then?”
Um. OK as one of the less-skilled masses, a quickie check; I’d heard on some (supposedly good) tech show that a router either has or acts as a firewall thus rendering any other redundant. I’ve heard elsewhere that’s not the case. And nothing terribly persuasive for either argument. I opted for ‘without’ since NAV and ZoneAlarm didn’t like eash other and (cross fingers) seem to be fine. Or am I?
If you’ve got one of those connection-sharing routers (called a NAT router), then yes, it’s basically impossible for anything outside your home network to connect to (and thus attack) your computer unless you specifically configure your router to allow them to do so, and even then it’ll be relatively restricted. What this doesn’t protect you against is any of the computers on your home network, so if a flatmate gets a virus, his computer will be able to connect to yours directly, and maybe infect it. But yes, your router affords you a large degree of protection from the outside world.
The reason this works is that your router is sharing one IP address between multiple computers. When you connect to (say) a webpage, the router remembers that your computer is the one making that connection, and when it receives the page data from the site you’re connecting to, it forwards it to your computer. When someone from the outside tries to connect, however, all the router knows is that they’re trying to connect to the one IP address shared by your home computers. So it won’t forward traffic to anyone, since it doesn’t know where to send it. Voila, your computer is protected.
I think you’re fine without a firewall in this case, unless you’ve got other people on your home network who you think might run unsafe computers.
I am clueless because I came of age before home computers existed. Everytime I have my computer serviced I ask the technician for some kind of resource that would enable me to be more informed. I have yet to encounter a coherent response. The ball is in your court. I will take your advice. Literally. Please help.
One somewhat minor quibble: while a good NAT router will indeed fend off the barbarians who may be trying to batter down the walls, it will not protect your computer from the Trojans in the horse. There are any number of freeware and shareware downloads which will install little “extras” along with the main product, and a NAT router will not normally stop these from “phoning home” once they’re activated.
ZoneAlarm is not by any means a perfect product, but there have been several occasions when it has alerted my daughter that something out of the ordinary was being attempted. My standing instruction to her is to say “no” to any request she doesn’t understand until she or I have a chance to do some research.
And an anti-spyware product (pr preferably more than one) is IMHO an absolute necessity in these degenerate times.
Yes. But if you’ve got an “always on” connection like DSL or cable, then running a firewall on your PC is still a pretty good idea. It won’t hurt, other than sucking up a couple of extra cycles on your PC, and if a hacker happens to figure out that there’s a router on your connection he can figure out how to hack your PC. Not a certainty that this will happen, but this is most definately a “better safe than sorry” case.
