Antivirus Boot CDs

Here’s a few boot CDs to fight malware.

FREE Bootable AntiVirus Rescue CDs

13 Antivirus Rescue CDs

20 Minutes to Live

Scary.

Infected in Twenty Minutes

Foolproof Way to Prevent Viruses and Other Nasties.

Never use a computer.

Running Windows Viruses on WINE

Ever wonder what would happen?

Now you know

Pretty humorous article, too.

Why don’t you ever hear of a Linux virus?

There’s only about 40 Linux viruses, and only one or two have been seen in the wild. Why?

Here’s a good article explaining why.

And here’s another article.

Basically, it’s a mix of market share, better security, and open-source code.

Worried about Conficker?

If you’re worried you’ve got Conficker, use this handy eye chart to tell if you have it. (Instructions are on the page.)

But believe this — it’s not as bad as the news makes it out. (They do it for a quick buck.) At the very worst, where a virus lodges into the boot sector, you’d have to do a low-level format (overwriting everything) then a reinstall of the OS. Which is only a pr0blem if you never do backups.

IE vs Firefox — Drive By Downloads

Found this video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qxg0z6YQy4

RogueRemover

I have to put in a good word for a rogueware remover that actually works — It’s from MalwareBytes, and it’s free (although the Pro version, which provides realtime protection, costs money). It’s called RogueRemover FREE.

Although I haven’t personally tested it myself (I’m not going to infect my computer, and mom would not be very happy if I used hers), I suggested it to someone else who had rogueware and she says it worked.

Note: Rogueware is a malware pretending to be an antivirus or spyware remover. It often gives you results to trick you into buying a software which essentially does nothing. It’s also hard to remove. Very hard. For an example of one, check out the Wikipedia article on WinFixer.
A few hours later: I found another article about this — here it is.

Removing SecuROM from your system

I am anti-”copy protection” and it pisses me off that these big corporations can leave crap (such as the SecuROM rootkit) on your computer after you’ve uninstalled the game, and yet since its big corporations (such as Sony, which developed SecuROM) nobody seems to care that it can hurt your computer. (I’ve seen cases of it disabling CD burners, not letting you open the task manager, forbidding access to the legal games you bought, and even making the operating system unusable.)

However, you can get rid of SecuROM by following these instructions. Read them very carefully, and only attempt if you know a fair bit about computers.

Good luck!

AVG thinks Winamp is a virus?

Today, because of Winamp crashing a lot (the computer accidentally got unplugged, corrupting something), I had to reinstall it. But as I tried to run it, AVG popped up saying that “zlib.dll” was a virus, and crashed Winamp!

Well, after running zlib.dll through VirusTotal:

http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/bdbfb9a63becf31cdd7b36e43f318a28

Out of 36 anti-virus engines, only AVG found it as a virus. So I can confidently say it is a false positive.

Well, so what do you do? Until AVG gets around to fixing it, here’s a solution.

Also, if you quartintined the file, you can go to the Virus Vault and restore it — BUT you have to add the exception or it’ll crash again!

This is meant for AVG 8 or above.