Malware Alert - April 29, 2013

College Confidential Community
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I’ve worked in the IT department of three different Fortune 500 companies and even the financial services folks have come to believe that once one person is aware of an issue (or has potentially been impacted by an issue), the postiives of communication outweigh the negatives.

I wouldn’t use my PC for any sort of financial activity such as online banking, retirement plan management, or anything involving transmitting account or credit card numbers without a good security package installed (i.e., it’s not just for CC; the criminals are getting more sophisticated by the day).

Thumper1, I think you’ll be happy with MalwareBytes Pro. Jym626, I can’t honestly say I think MSE is “ready for prime time.” [Microsoft</a> Security Essentials Tanks Another Antivirus Test](<a href=“http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/security-software/307816-microsoft-security-essentials-tanks-another-antivirus-test]Microsoft”>Microsoft Security Essentials Tanks Another Antivirus Test | PCMag). If you want to take advantage of Google’s warnings, you’ll need to use either Firefox or Chrome.

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My DH has also worked in IT for big companies. Wonder if you know each other!
He made me remove some additional malware thing I had on the home computer because the 2 virus protection programs were fighting with each other. What is the best one that wont fight with MSE, Steve? I ran the full mse scan on my office computer and it had one of the 2 infections that my home computer had (the exploit but not the trojan)

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I emailed that article to my DH and both DS’s for their input. Looks like its time to trash MSE and install Norton. That said, I am hearing from other cc’ers who have Norton that it didnt catch these infections either.

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Bearing in mind there are two tasks for malware protection (prevention and detection/cleanup for when the prevention doesn’t work), I use the strategy Roger talks about in his post above. At home, I have Norton running real-time for prevention, but have some incident-specific tools I’ve accumulated over the years for detection/cleanup. I like the economics of putting money into prevention and relying on the free stuff for damage control. Emsisoft’s emergency kit and Kaspersky’s TDSSKiller have worked well for me in that respect. MalwareBytes is also good.

I couldn’t say why Norton caught the current problem for me and didn’t for others. Update scheduling could be a factor. Another possibility (though not necessarily a good one) is that a rootkit is residing in their system and obstructing Norton’s performance. Sounds strange but I’ve had it happen to me before.

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Norton did NOT catch the most recent malware issue for me. Thus the purchase of Malwarebytes Pro. DH hopes the two together prevent any future issues.