searching for spyware

[dephunked]

searching for spyware

msconfig can be helpful to see what loading on startup.
Many of these things are attached to MSIE in some way, like silly little toolbars. Choose Firefox as an alternative browser and you won't look back.

If you're worried about these things 'calling home' then a firewall might help - although many run over http.
The ultimate paranoia will lead you to reinstalling Windows, installing a firewall and signature matching IDS. Sounds ridiculous - but how do you know the spyware remover isn't spying on you?

[malandri]

Re: searching for spyware

I use Spybot and another program called "HijackThis". You can search in yahoo for this program and download it, it worked perfectly for me

I had many issues with spyware in the past and i had to spent a whole weekend to register all the processes that run in my laptop in an excel file and eventually clean up the mess. Now, when something is wrong, i can quickly find which is the "guilty" process by comparing the list i have with the one in the task manager

You can find what each processes is about by putting its name in a search engine. I had a few notorious ones running >:

As a general advice, never click in any pop ups or download any software you are not 100% sure what it is about...

Good luck!

[OwlHoot]

.

I'm feeling too lazy to type much at the moment, but the following is a cut-n-paste from one of my links/notes files. (Damn - after all that I've gone and typed too much anyway!)

www.sysinternals.com/ntw2...cexp.shtml

Excellent Windows Process Explorer v8.30 (freeware)


For best results, needs the following packages installed as well:
* "Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows"
* "Windows symbol packages"


www.microsoft.com/whdc/de...llx86.mspx

Download page for "Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows"


www.microsoft.com/whdc/de...olpkg.mspx

Download page for "Windows symbol packages"


(After devoting quite some time and effort to installing the Microsoft symbol packages etc, as the program readme recommends, I couldn't see anything different with the output. But in some circs there may be advantages to having that set up as well.)