Be aware of spyware!

General Topics
1

Dear forum members,

Spyware is becoming more and more of a threat. With spyware unauthorized persons can get to information on your machine from trivial data to critical information like credit card data or passwords. So it is of the utmost importance to get protected. Here are a few tips for everyone.

  1. Be pro-active, have a policy, be aware of the threats, install adequate anti-spyware technology.
  2. Instruct other users. Some spyware can circumvent firewalls. A system without a firewall is open to worms looking for open ports on the net. Make users aware of threats.
  3. Check your licenses before downloading any software. Free software and ad ware may contain spyware.
  4. Think first, click later. Read safety information first, then decide what to do. Is content from a reliable source?
  5. Look out for technical signals of active spyware on your system like regular crashes, system instability, not fully functioning applications, strange tools. Spyware is not properly coded.
  6. Select the most effective anti-spyware solution. Multilayer gateway protection is to be preferred.
  7. Block spyware downloads. Spyware must be identified, pro-actively blocked. Spyware servers should be blocked also.
    Block spyware ID’s.
  8. Use the right parameters like ActiveX ID, or switch to a safer browser. Browser add-ons may be a source of infection. Use an add-on policy. Add-ons should be user-defined.
  9. Block spyware signatures. Use a signature database combined with good heuristic technology.
  10. Block spyware communications in its tracks. Communication between installed spyware and source servers should be blocked to render the spyware useless.

This is a good policy for everyone to follow. Most of us know this to be so. I put it here for the people that are not aware yet.

Regards,

polonus

2

Very good advice.

“Think first, click later.” It’s always a good idea to do a web-search whenever downloading new software, no matter what it is. Something as simple as “software-name+spyware” will often identify a problem. And even seemingly legitimate, mainstream software may have (sometimes as an optional extra) some phone-home software you probably don’t want.

3

Thanks Polonus!

I think “instruct other users” is a crucial point.

It doesn’t matter now hard you fight spyware if another user of your computer is downloading every piece of malware on the net.

In a family of course, this usually means the kids, downloading music, videos and games and opening every file that gets passed around the internet via email attachment or MSN file transfer.

The social engineering that goes with spyware is particularly effective on kids. Indeed, some is actually targeted at kids as Ben Edelman has pointed out.

If you have kids in the family, make sure you sit down with them and give them a lesson in spyware prevention, otherwise you’re going to be cleaning up their mess.

There are some very good video on the Microsoft site. It’s a good place to start:

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/videos/downloads.mspx?

A “reliable source” for software is snapfiles.com: they don’t allow spyware programs on their site, and if you can’t find what you’re looking for there, it probably doesn’t exist!