Don't be a zombie

Filed in archive Anti-Spam Tools on January 15, 2007

Although I don't usually mend people's computers for free, nor for money anymore, I recently got a hysterical plead from my mother to check out what's going on with their neighbor's computer. I asked her not to do this, but she loves telling people how smart children she got, so I was pressured into obeying and she also threatened to stop making cakes and pies, which was the last drop.

The situation was such that the neighbor got ISP banned for sending spam. Apparently there was loads of e-mail traffic coming from his computer, which could mean just one thing, he got owned, turned into a zombie slave of the bot net.

After some investigation, one could tell that he old sod surfed the 'adult' websites, clicked on anything he could, together with downloading 'interesting' wallpapers. Like for guns, people should get permits for computers too, I think. But, not to fuss, I cleaned his computer with my Nod32 (the best anti-virus there is in my opinion), turned off his shitty Windows firewall and even more shittier System restore. Once the computer was clean, and knowing hat he has little money, I protected his computer using three free yet very good solutions.

For the basic anti-virus protection I installed Avast, I put his connection behind the Ghost firewall and last but not least I installed Search and Destroy, which is an adware cleaner, but also a nifty registry change Protector. And, of course, I made him a user account, with no admin privileges, which someone apparently forgot to do.

And you know what? The old guy next door stopped sending spam. His ISP is happy, my mother is happy, and after all I am happy too, because I got my cakes and my pies back. Hope someone out there saw a flunk in incoming spam levels, that would round the story up nicely.

So, if you're ever in doubt, use what I did, it helps for sure.