Basics of Spyware Removal—How to avoid it in the first place!

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When we last saw our Superhero…

At this point, you have a basic frame­work for how to identify/remove spy­ware from a PC.   If you missed Part I you can access it below:

Basics of Spy­ware Removal — Part I

Using that infor­ma­tion should be suf­fi­cient to fix most Spy­ware infes­ta­tions. For those “stub­born” pieces of Spy­ware I plan on devel­op­ing an advanced Spy­ware removal entry—but that is going to take a lit­tle time to assem­ble. So I thought it made some sense to give you some guide­lines on how to avoid get­ting Spy­ware in the first place.

Doc­tor it hurts when I do that — So stop doing it !

I wish there was a pearl of wis­dom I could give every­one as to how to avoid Spy­ware; I could say prac­tice “safe com­put­ing” but that isn’t very help­ful. So what I have is assem­bled the fol­low­ing list that you can use as a ref­er­ence (and if I missed some­thing — let me know so I can update this list)

The Easy Stuff

1. Avoid Screen’s or Popup’s that look like they are try­ing to help you.
   • “Alert!  We have found Spy­ware on your com­puter” And then includes a ques­tion ask­ing if you want them to help you remove it.
   • Pop-ups for “spe­cial offers” for Spy­ware removal.

One of the older spy­ware tricks you might see is a web page (or a pop up) that says some­thing along the lines of either:

A com­mon mis­take peo­ple make is to answer screens that appear to be help­ing them. Often these pop-ups or pages say some­thing along the lines of:

You should just assume trou­ble is around the cor­ner—never answer yes or say OK to this unless you know and trust the source.

Once the panic has sub­sided from see­ing this mes­sage, you should first try to close the win­dow by click­ing on the X but­ton in the upper right hand cor­ner.  If that doesn’t work, you need to try some­thing more advanced such as:

For those famil­iar with the Win­dows “Task Man­ager”, enabled by press­ing the keys marked CTRL, ALT and DEL simul­ta­ne­ously, you are able to bring up a list of run­ning Appli­ca­tions and Tasks. From here, you can select the prob­lem­atic browser win­dow to close it.

2. Avoid installing Browser Toolbars.

Another sug­ges­tion is to avoid/minimize the instal­la­tion of browser tool­bars. I am not a fan of tool­bars (although I do have the Google tool­bar) pri­mar­ily because they take up a large amount of screen space. I most com­monly see peo­ple get­ting into trou­ble when they down­load tool­bars for coupon and/or gam­ing sites—so you should really think twice before installing them.

Advanced info: It should go with­out say­ing that tool­bars from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are spy­ware free. And if you do decide to down­load a tool­bar, you should imme­di­ately run one of your Spy­ware tools to deter­mine if you have been infected.

3. Only install soft­ware from known sources

While it may be tempt­ing to click on the file or link a friend sends you in an email, it could con­tain a virus, spy­ware, or both. If you do decide to run the file, I sug­gest you run your Spy­ware tools after to deter­mine if you have been infected.

For ref­er­ence, an exam­ple of a site that con­tains down­loads that are Spy­ware free is:

http://download.cnet.com/windows/

4. Make sure your anti-virus soft­ware is up to date.

As we have said pre­vi­ously, there is no one solu­tion that pre­vents spy­ware from get­ting on your machine, but hav­ing mul­ti­ple lines of “defense” isn’t going to hurt you. (Editor’s Note: never use more than one Anti-Virus soft­ware on a com­puter at one time).

Advanced info: Your Inter­net Ser­vice Provider (ISP) may pro­vide you with free Anti-virus soft­ware. If you don’t have Anti-virus soft­ware installed on your PC (or your sub­scrip­tion is about to expire) you should check with your ISP first.

5. Down­load CCleaner

There is a util­ity I rec­om­mend called CCleaner—while  its not a “spy­ware” tool per-se—it’s a use­ful util­ity to have on your sys­tem to keep it run­ning smoothly.

http://www.piriform.com/download

While you should always have your data files backed up before installing any soft­ware pro­gram or using soft­ware that “cleans” your com­puter, I have run this pro­gram suc­cess­fully for years with­out incident.

The Harder stuff

Tech­ni­cal Warn­ing: It’s hard not to avoid this level of detail—but it is useful/important

6. You pri­mary Win­dows account should not have Admin­is­tra­tor Access
   • Stan­dard User
   • Admin­is­tra­tor

To be hon­est, you shouldn’t have to know this, but with Win­dows you do. For some background—in Win­dows, there are 2 types of user accounts (each of which defines how much “con­trol” over the sys­tem that account has)—which fall into 2 broad categories:

If your account has Admin­is­tra­tor access, that means your account has access to every­thing. This means when a piece of Spy­ware enters your machine, it has access to every­thing as wel—which allows it to do the most damage.

Advanced Info: While chang­ing your account to “stan­dard user” won’t stop you from get­ting Spy­ware, it usu­ally helps to limit the scope of the Spy­ware attack. For a badly infected account you can some­times log into a dif­fer­ent account that has Admin­is­tra­tor access to clean the machine.

The only draw­back to be found when chang­ing your account type, though this may vary based on the ver­sion of Win­dows being used, is that you may end up receiv­ing numer­ous noti­fi­ca­tions from Win­dows, typ­i­cally dur­ing soft­ware instal­la­tions, which can become annoy­ing at times.

7. Chang­ing your  Browser Secu­rity “settings”

Once again another tech­ni­cal topic. For Microsoft Inter­net Explorer, the default browser found in Win­dows, you have the abil­ity to change the browser set­tings. This is impor­tant because Microsoft Explorer allows com­po­nents called “activeX con­trols” to run from within the browser. Chang­ing the set­tings will warn you about these con­trols before they run.

Advanced Info: Chang­ing your Browser set­tings will cause more warn­ing noti­fi­ca­tions to appear on the screen. This can be annoy­ing for the casual user. How­ever, using other Browsers (such as Fire­fox or Chrome) alle­vi­ates this prob­lem as they don’t pro­vide sup­port for ActiveX controls.

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Tags: spyware utilities security administrator windows

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