..are every where these days and for me I can gladly say I’ve not had to worry about them. Maybe it’s cause I’m lucky, maybe it’s cause I don’t get much spam… really it’s true, or maybe it’s cause I don’t wonder what the email could really be about from someone that I’ve never heard of. Better yet with a sender or subject that are not actual words.

Then you have the phishing email asking you to confirm personal information… are you kidding me !!! If a stranger knocked on your door saying he was from your bank, asked you to fill out this form with information they already have… you’d really do that ??? Come on if common sense says don’t do it in person why does the internet make it ok.

And of course just putting a machine on the internet with no firewall can be dangerous. What was it 30 minutes ? Microsoft put an unprotected machine on the internet and in 30 minutes it was compromised … at least I remember that from a Microsoft paid advertisement for XP on G4Tech TV.

Some ammunition about why you should have a firewall can be found on Microsoft’s TechNet but that is not to say they should only be used for Windows® based machines. You should have one period.

This brings me to my latest personal challenge, cleaning a machine that is infected. A friend was having trouble with a PC when it accessed the internet. Luckily they had Norton Anti Virus Software so it would catch anything that would come in but it did not stop the annoying pop adds nor the rogue processes that would bring there surfing to a screeching halt. Now I can honestly say I am no expert at this but I did learn from it.

The short version of the long story is with help from SpyWare Doctor, the Internet and good old Safe Mode the machine is back to normal… for now. I say for now cause there is still an issue with Internet Explorer, did not have time to completely research and fix, but surfing is no problem with Mozilla’s Firefox and email is working.

So it’s not a perfect fix but does get them up and running till it’s replaced, which should be soon. With some help from Zone Alarm for a firewall their experience should be uninterrupted.

I’ve put in my two cents for replacing it with a Mac. Since pictures and video are on the list of important features they could be a convert. I did not mention LINUX cause that did not seem to be a good fit for what they use a PC for… but in time it will.

March 21 update ..

Well after hearing back from the friends what I thought was fixed was not. After a few minutes of surfing internet access was bogged down by rougue tasks from some executables in \windows\system. Funny how Norton and SpyDoctor did not detect them. But I had a feeling that might happen, task manager just didn’t look right. I went ahead and installed SpyBot to try another angle, which helped. I also took the time to research the tasks a little more carefully with some help from Answers That Work which pretty much took care of any questions I had about something being legit. After tweeking msconfig, getting rid of the registery entries that were bogus it now appears everything is back to normal.

We’ll see …