Stephane Asselin’s Blog

Sometimes, viruses, trojans and spyware are more tenacious than others. One apparent virus swimming around the Internet has been called the “Windows Update virus,” because it looks like a message to update your Windows software but has been identified as a trojan called dnetc.exe.

If you’re running a Windows XP operating system and for some reason, you’re still not running an Anti-virus software and anti-malware software, then you are probably infected.

if you really want to get scared, look at the Shadowserver Foundation, they are a group of security professional monitoring the web to estimate the number of owned PC’s that are acting as Bots for bad people. This is a scary statistics, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of PC’s, the majority of them used without the user even noticing that he’s compromised.

This is sad because clearly, no true Microsoft program would be identified as a Trojan virus, so this should be removed from your PC immediately.

If you want to stay out of the statistics or if you want to know if you’re infected, you don’t have to pay the big bucks, just a little know-how and a about an hour of your time and you should be able to clean up any virus or malware from your machine.

My personal recommendation, invest the money, pay a reasonable price to get a good anti-virus and anti-malware program. There are a bunch of signature-based program on the market today, usually bundled with a good firewall and anti-malware program. I’m not saying the Microsoft Firewall is bad but an all-in-one security suite is usually better, less processing cycles, less overhead and less chances of program conflicts.

Take the time to look it up, look at reviews, if you can, get a hold of the 2008 Gartner Endpoint Security magic quadrant (this one is from 2006) or look for software reviews.

My top three picks for paid yearly subscription: McAfee, CA, Kaspersky.

The acceptable free ones: AVG and Avast

For free anti-malware, if you’re already infected, it’s not too late, a lot of these sites will ofer online scanning for free (CA does a pretty good job of this). If you’re clean or if you know for a fact that you have a healthy MAC or PC, you should either use the paid and more robust Internet security suite from one of the vendors mentioned above or try one of the free ones.

Free anti-malware: Microsoft (Windows Defender), Malware bytes

So, take the time, take action and clean up after yourself

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 23:31 and is filed under Security advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.