Spybot - Search and Destroy

Without touching on the blog taboo that is work, suffice it to say that I'm a savvy computer user. I'll even push the limit a bit and say I've held more than one job in my career where my sole focus was on information security, especially with respect to the Internet.

As anyone who has read this blog for more than 0.65 seconds knows, Desiree and I are huge gamers - tabletop, console, computer, etc. The "computer" part of that hobby makes it impractical to have anything but a Microsoft Windows OS on my primary desktop computer at home. In what can only be described as a victory of convenience over common (and occupational) sense, I also use Internet Explorer as my main browser on that machine. Since we have a weblog, it wouldn't take very keen detection skills to come to the (correct) conclusion that we browse the web. A lot.

Why am I rambling about all of this? This is a cautionary tale. No, not THAT cautionary tale. Just take it under advisement that even someone who carefully administers a hardware firewall for their home network, updates virus definitions and runs virus scans religiously, and for whom Internet security has been a profession can still fall prey to adware and spyware.

Read more about the subject at Tom Coyote, and grab their recommended (free, but donations requested) malware scan/fix program, Spybot - Search and Destroy. My personal experience is that it has found and fixed many things that my antivirus software couldn't/wouldn't.

Posted by Dan on November 14, 2003 at 12:09 PM | TrackBack