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Me#1You#10 · Site Admin Joined: 06 May 2004 Posts: 6503

Stumbled across this article recently and am passing it along FWIW. I did some preliminary checking in a security forum that I frequent and Prevx CSI appears to be a reputable and somewhat effective program (among several others)...and FREE.

Ran it on mine and I came up clean (whew). Anyway, give it a try if you haven't properly nourished your security paranoia as of late...

baldeagle · Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 3:36 am Post subject:

Good find, #1..I, too, was clean, but this seems to be a good tool to run occasionally.
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GoophyDog · Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 9:12 pm Post subject:

Clean as well. Thanks Me, though its interesting that in para 12 they do mention doing some data collection and reporting. I'm wondering if it is automatic or you get to choose to send info on.

I've been using WinPatrol for a number of years and between it and Symantec I've yet to be hit (fingers crossed).
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BuffaloJack · Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 10:11 pm Post subject:

I tried it and I'm clean.
This whole anti-virus, spyware, root kit thing is a pain.
I would image that most people run the top 3 or 4 (McAfee, Norton, etc.). These first line products are very good at catching virsues, worm, trojans and the like, but they have one flaw. In order to not interfere too much with your machine and actually allow you to get some work in of your own, they limit their active searches to stuff that isn't more than 2 or 3 years old. If you get a critter that has been around for 5 or 6 years, or maybe some old boot sector virus that is 10 years old, they will not detect it. A couple of the other AV programs are good for this. The one called Housecall at TrendMicro is excellent at this. If you actually subscribe to the Trend Micro stuff, it is a resource hog and you PC will run slow and frustrate you, however, running their free housecall every few months works wonders and finds lots of stuff McAfee and Norton miss.
One of the tricks the IT guys do at work is run McAfee on one server and Norton on another and then they have them configured to check each other. They still run TrendMicro's housecall periodically.
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Me#1You#10 · Site Admin Joined: 06 May 2004 Posts: 6503

Thanks Jack...I'll check it out.

dusty · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 5:44 am Post subject:

Operating a computer repair company, I too frequent a number of PC Repair forums and routinely clean viruses and spyware off of anywhere from 4 to 15 computers weekly.
The large majority of PC Repair technicians across the country use several products to find and remove these pests.

Here is my list of cleaners.
No. 1 to install and run on an infected machine is AVG's free edition antivirus program.
No. 2 is VUndo
No. 3 is Prevx.
No. 4 is Superantispy free for home users edition.
No. 5 is the AVG free antispy program.
No. 6 is the AVG Rootkit scanner (also free to use)

NOTE: I get a lot of computers that are so infected nothing can be installed on them even in safe mode. On these machines it's necessary to remove the hard drive and mount is as a slave drive in another computer and scan the drive from there.
As always, the System Restore feature should be turned off before the scans are run to prevent re-infection from those protected files.
Once the system is clean of infections the System Restore is turned back on and Clean restore point is set.

I always leave the Superantispy and the AVG antirootkit programs installed on the customer's computer with instructions on how to use them included in his/her invoice.
If they have a paid up subscription to any antivirus programs I leave that applicaton on their computer and re-activate it and then remove the antivirus products I installed.
(I always deactivate whatever antivirus program any computer has on it before I install the AVG product. It is not a good practice to have more than one antivirus program running at the same time. It is ok to have several antispy programs running together.)

Quite often I have to run a program that resets the TCP/IP stack and the Winsock layers to restore Internet functionality that malware has corrupted. XPTCP/IP reset is a good free application to use for this purpose.
http://www.xp-smoker.com/freeware.html

Most users of Norton and McAfee would be shocked to see the number of infections those two progams will miss finding. Although in the last 12 mos. they have both improved drastically in their performance.

Dusty
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Me#1You#10 · Site Admin Joined: 06 May 2004 Posts: 6503

Ahhhh...nice to know we have a voice of experience to access here Wink

dusty · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 1:17 pm Post subject:

Me$1 you are correct. Vundo is a trojan. There is a remover for it and several other hard to remove trojans called Vundofix.exe
I'm sorry I didn't put the full name in the above posting but when anyone searched for the name Vundo they would have come up with the link to download the Vundofix.exe file from many sites like Symantec and many other antivirus vendors.
Here is the link to the download for Vundofix.exe
Click on the Downloads link and VundoFix.exe is at the top of the list.
http://www.atribune.org/

Dusty
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Left and Wrong are the opposite of Right!

Me#1You#10 · Site Admin Joined: 06 May 2004 Posts: 6503