Antivirus

I have seen so many spyware/malware/virus infested PC's that its finally time that I let the cat out of the bag. There are two steps you can take to ensure that your PC remains healthy and fast.

The first, of course, is to stay away from untrusted sites and NOT to open email attachments unless you're sure who they're from. No one is going to give you even a single dollar (let alone thousands) for free - so don't believe that mail. Similarly, do not download and install any program until you read its review on a trusted site such as Download.com (which gaurantees all downloads are spyware free).<

The second (drum roll please - big secret being unvieled) is to use a limited account in Windows XP or 2000 for casual surfing, gaming, document processing etc. Any program executed from a limited account cannot affect your Windows or Program Files directory. So the chances of an infection while you surf get reduced drastically. To create a limited account, go to the Control Panel and click on 'User Accounts'. Select 'Create a New Account' from the tasks list, enter the name of your new account (something like 'Everybody' or 'General' or 'Limited' will do), and select the 'Limited' radio button on the next screen. Click on 'Create Account' and you're done. Remember to logon using this account from now on.

To install a new program, to change settings, or to run a program with administrator priveliges, right click the installation/program and select 'Rus As..' from the context menu. Select your full priveliges profile (usually the one you create with your name during installation) in the dialog box that appears and enter your password (remember that this will not work if your password is blank). To start an Explorer window with administrator priveliges, right-click on the Internet Explorer icon on your quick launch menu, select 'Run As..', and enter the password. Activate the address bar of the window that launches and enter 'c:'. You should have an administrator priveliges explorer window. Any program executed through this window will run with full priveliges - so be careful. You can even uninstall programs, make changes to the registry, stop services - anything that you could do earlier.

There, now you have no reason to have a slow and buggy computer. I have been using a computer without an antivirus or spyware remover (highly unadvisable - unless you know what you are doing) without having any problems whatsoever just by following these simple steps.

Just a month after McAfee released an update that ended up deleting important programs in computers, it's now Symantec's turn to face the music. A critical bug has been identified in Norton Antivirus that allows a hacker to gain complete control over a computer running the antivirus software.

This is especially troublesome for home users who do not turn on automatic updates for their software in order to save bandwidth. Corporate computers usually install latest updates. Now that the vulnerability is public, any worm that is created to exploit this vulnerability would inevitably find some computers unpatched, and hence allow a hacker to gain access to the computer.

In view of these announcements, I'm very attracted to open-source (read free) anti-virus software, at least for home use. Three major examples are AVG Free Edition, avast! Home Edition and AntiVir Personal Edition. At least I won't be paying for software that harms my computer, instead of protecting it.

A very interesting thing happened recently. McAfee, a 'leading' anti-virus software developer, sent out updates that recognized major commercial software as viruses. For example, it marked MS Excel as a virus. Consequently, users that had selected 'auto-delete' as their default option, suddenly found that Excel and a host of other programs were not available.

This is professional hara-kiri for an anti-virus software. I use McAfee and I was afraid to log into the administrator account of my laptop (updates are only installed when you login as the administrator). To be honest, I still am. Thankfully, I did not have many programs installed.

I'm sure this has severely reduced the trust that people have on McAfee. Moral of the story: Always QC your deliverable.

More details of this can be found in this article from ZDNet news.