Personal Recommendations for Malware cleanup

Hi

After a long interval, I recently had to clean up a couple
of infected PC's, both secretarial stations. One was
infected by going to a bad website with IE and another
was infected by the son of a lawyer doing something in
regards to a music download site. The first PC ended
up being thoroughly infected because the secretary was
afraid to tell anyone what she did. The second one a
bit less so. I was amazed at how much work it took/is
taking to clean them up, especially the first one, using
Kaspersky, F-Secure, LSP-Fix and so on. For the second
one, the secretary tried downloading and installing the
trial version of Norton 360 on her own. That caught a
bunch of things but not all. I tried using the new F-Prot
on it as a test, and let it run overnight, and while that
caught a few more bugs, there is still at least one pop-up
bug remaining that I suspect is using LSP. I will finish
things up tomorrow.

I'm getting concerned with how nothing seems able to
thoroughly clean an infected PC anymore automatically --
things seem to require more and more manual effort,
including running things like LSP-Fix and HijackThis.

Have you guys found any do-it-all programs you tend to
currently recommend to infection-prone friends and such?
I know prevention is the best medicine, but licenses
expire, glitches occur, and some programs, like Norton
360, will just stop working without notice (it has some
sort of update bug.) Thanks in advance.

-BC

Stop using IE, use firefox with the no script plugin for the default web
browser. Stop using Outlook Express email client and use Thunderbird
and turn off java script.

Use a good antivirus, anti spyware, and firewall.

Don't open attachments unless the source is known and your expecting it
and then scan it first.

Stay away from any Porn sites or warez web sites.

Don't download any free antispyware programs without doing a search
first to find out if they are legit.

Don't open ecards or anything with an .exe extension you get or any
microsoft patches sent in your email they don't patch that way.

BC wrote:


> Hi
>
> After a long interval, I recently had to clean up a couple
> of infected PC's, both secretarial stations. One was
> infected by going to a bad website with IE and another
> was infected by the son of a lawyer doing something in
> regards to a music download site. The first PC ended
> up being thoroughly infected because the secretary was
> afraid to tell anyone what she did. The second one a
> bit less so. I was amazed at how much work it took/is
> taking to clean them up, especially the first one, using
> Kaspersky, F-Secure, LSP-Fix and so on. For the second
> one, the secretary tried downloading and installing the
> trial version of Norton 360 on her own. That caught a
> bunch of things but not all. I tried using the new F-Prot
> on it as a test, and let it run overnight, and while that
> caught a few more bugs, there is still at least one pop-up
> bug remaining that I suspect is using LSP. I will finish
> things up tomorrow.
>
> I'm getting concerned with how nothing seems able to
> thoroughly clean an infected PC anymore automatically --
> things seem to require more and more manual effort,
> including running things like LSP-Fix and HijackThis.
>
> Have you guys found any do-it-all programs you tend to
> currently recommend to infection-prone friends and such?
> I know prevention is the best medicine, but licenses
> expire, glitches occur, and some programs, like Norton
> 360, will just stop working without notice (it has some
> sort of update bug.) Thanks in advance.
>
> -BC
>