Drive by

Wed, June 14, 2006 - 10:51 PM

I was working on my computer tonght, surfing the internet, and was almost the victum of a "drive by". This is spyware that is secretly injected into a system via a vulnerability in Windows. Fortunately, I am a true paranoid computer geek and run several antivirus and antispyware products on my system.

So I surfed to a ordinary site and a dozen alarms appeared in front of me from Norton. Seems the web site had some "malicious" (meaning evilly intentioned) code which tried to place a virus on my system. This virus would cause popups to appear every 15 minutes (I looked it up on the internet) and allow the owner of the virus to get into my computer and do what he wanted.

The attempt was foiled, although I did get some strange popups for a while until I found the little itty-bitty window in the corner of my screen that was throwing them up every once in a while.

I ran three difference scanners and my system is rated completely "clean" by all of them.

Whew.

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Comments

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Melis (Wed, June 14, 2006 - 11:15 PM)

Which protection software do you use, out of curiosity?

Richard Lowe Jr (Thu, June 15, 2006 - 5:33 AM)

Norton antivirus 2006, Microsoft defender, Winpatrol, Spybot search and destroy (with tea timer) and Ad-Aware. I also keep my system patches current, use the Windows XP firewall and have a hardware Sonic 3 firewall installed.

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