It’s not just a vaccination anymore. There are too many terms for the problemware invading your computer nowadays. I think the industry finally settled on just Virus and Spyware, but for a while there people were using terms like Adware and Malware also. I would have thought they would have settled with malware instead of spyware because malware covers anything malicious while spyware is a term for a program installed in your computer to gather and return information or spy.

Anyway, so how about all those choices out there. Even after you pick a brand by asking that relative that is supposed to be a wiz and that elder shopper showing you the latest consumer reports you still have to choose a package. It seems like the major players have settled into a small/medium/large scaling system. Most consumers will base their choice by price at this point. If they really want to be protected and they have the extra cash they will buy large etc. This choice should be made based on the computer it will be installed on and not the price. If you are protecting an older computer that does not have much memory or speed and you are not planning on upgrading either of these statistics than you don’t need large. Yes, large will protect you more, but at what expense on performance. It may use what little resources you had left just to keep running in the background and then when you want to actually use the computer you have to wait much longer to complete a task. My advice for the older computer is buy the small option for basic protection. It will prevent a total crash by detecting and removing most baddies. If you are running at least 1GB RAM with XP or 2GB RAM with Vista then you can go for medium or large. Some software companies don’t have a large, but the difference between their medium and large are usually minimal.

Right now I am trying out Microsoft OneCare which I would think to be a ‘meduim’ even though Microsoft does not have a full line of choices like Symantec or McAfee. Another medium that I would recommend would be Kaspersky. They have a internet security package that is about the same price as its competition and boasts a couple bullet points that outweigh the others. The next one I want to try out is made by a company called eset. They say on their site that they were awarded by some major publications, but I think I found them through a google search and not by reading one of the reviews.

Thats all for now. Hope the info helps.

Posted in Software, Virus Removal - No Comments

The Vundo Trojan (aka Virtumonde or Virtumondo) as been the focus of my detestation for a little while now. Whenever I am researching symptoms there is always someone out there who says, ‘Could be Vundo. Run Vundo removal programs.’ In the worst cases I have found that this trojan or at least one of the strains of this trojan will cause a PC to run extremely slow. I am talking get coffee and drink it all during startup. Its purpose is also to download other baddies to spatter ads in your face and some of them can be quite a nuisance to remove. Norton has made a removal tool/scanner for vundo and there is at least one private source for another scanner/cleaner. Depending on what variation of the trojan and how long it has been burrowing in your system feeding off your bandwidth these scanners may not completely remove it all.

Anyway, the real reason I wanted to write this post is while I have been researching this problem and its removal I found a cause. The good folks over at atribune.org say on their instructions that one of the main ways vundo can get into your machine is through exploits in older versions of java and java runtime environment. This makes sense to me because when you are redirected to the java web site to download a updated version it will download and install the latest version, but it will not remove the past version during the installation. So if you go into your Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs you should see all the different versions of this program that you have had on your machine. You should remove these leaving only the latest versions.

The latest as of this post is ‘Java 6 Update 5′ and ‘Java SE Runtime Environment 6 Update 1′. When in doubt just remove them all and go to Java.com to download the latest.

Well thats all for now. Keep safe. If you need protection check out rsltech.com/ads.php

Posted in Virus Removal - 2 Comments