effing trojans now i am ticked...
 

Okay so the other day i am just doing some general surfing on the net ( cnn, espn..etc nothing odd) and my nortons 2005 pop ups saying I have a trojan, PWS.hooker affecting the file apihookdll.dll in windows/system32.....lovely. Now I run winxp pro (no sp2 installed, prirate copy i know i am scum) with a sygate personal firewall, router with firewall enabled, and all the latest patches from MS (minus sp2) and nortons up to date. The trojan was a bitch to remove. But its gone. The patch from nortons site did not work....lovely again....

Now I use firefox, just switched to it about a week or two ago. Is there anything else I could be doing to avoid this headache in the future? I use gmail, never download any attachments, scan all files I download....etc. Just a piss off. Not sure if there are some security settings in Firefox that i am missing, i do have java enabled as i post on some sites that require it. Any microsoft services that I should have off? i do have most of them disabled that i don't use but others i am not sure of there function. any ideas...besides not surfing!!!! :hmm:

I assume you scan for spyware regularly?

Personally, I hardly ever have problems with spyware, trojans, virii, and other nasty things. I use: a router, a firewall (sygate), a virus scanner (F-Prot), my own proxy server (linux thingy), a anti-popup personal proxy (proxomitron), an alternative browser (Opera)... and still some "tracking cookies" come through.

Ultimately, there's not much else you can do. Although I would recommend getting F-prot antivirus instead of norton. It's better and faster.

i think i might give that progam a try, i do use a spyware program as well, spybot search and destroy and adaware. thanks for the info.

a great deal of spyware/malware trojans get installed because of lax security standards with activeX or java. I don't use firefox so i'm not sure of settings details, but in IE you should never have ANY settings for activeX/java that are on 'enabled', instead they should be at 'prompt'. Now, this doesnt ALWAYS work, especially if the virus writer is exceptionally skilled and manipulating the appearance of the prompt windows.

I'd install SP2. I personally run WinXP Pro Sp2, with zonealarm and NO antivirus on my system (I have a second system with AVG that ill scan any download i dont trust) I also only use Internet Explorer and in the 4 months I have been running this setup, not a single problem. I currently ran ad-aware and it pulled up nothing but cookies, and a couple of online virus scanners showed nothing as well. Its all about where you surf, and not having SP2 in my experience keeps you vulnerable to those clever code writers to slip something into your system.

Firefox was a good choice. I think most of the stupid popups and quiet downloads target IE. Since I've started using Firefox I haven't had many problems with spyware. Spyware is horrible, evil crap that is worse than virii and other malware. Most of the stuff my antivirus detected was also detected by my spyware program.

you must also have balls of steel. :p :lol:

LoL! Not really, just a computer technician who has cleaned enough computers to know the easiest way they get infected, and the quickest method for cleaning. I recently downloaded a program from majorgeeks which was even classified as an Editors pick, and ended up infecting my work pc with spyware. You never know, it can come from anywhere even a site you trust.