".......Even if you're reasonably careful, there's still a strong likelihood that sooner or later you're going to get hit by something really unpleasant" "....... all the antivirus in the world won't protect you from every threat" 911 is a joke Want to survive a drive-by? Don't count on your antivirus alone - make sure you have this little lot ready and waiting. NETSTAT You should already have this on your PC - just open a command line window with Start>Run and type 'cmd', then type 'netstat'. There are some handy switches to modify how it works, just type 'netstat-help' to see them all. The '-b' switch is great for seeing which programs have connections open. It's a brilliant tool for quickly working out if anything's amiss. WINDOWS MALICIOUS SOFTWARE REMOVAL TOOL Again, you'll already have it, although, bizarrely on my PC the only way to run it is to navigate to Windows/System32 and double-click MRT.exe. It's good but as I found, far from infallible. MALWAREBYTES ANTI-MALWARE As far as I'm concerned, this is the daddy. Download it and install it right now, rather than having to hunt fot it in a panic in a few months time. I've already been quite so grateful for anything as I ws for the FileASSASSIN app. SUPERANTISPYWARE This came highly recommended as well, but in my paranoid state there was no way in hell I was going to trust a program with a bogus-sounding name like that. Still, it's supposed to be very good indeed. HIJACKTHIS A quick way to tell if something's been mucking around with your settings is to run HijackThis, it pokes around your registry and generates agreat big log file of its findings. Essensial if you're familiar with registry keys, and even if you're not you can paste log into www.hijackthis.de and it'll do its best to come up with an automatic analysis. SOPHOS ANTI-ROOTKIT We're probably into the overkill phase with this, by the time I ran it I was already sorted. It doesn't hurt to have it standing by though.
