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[KrazeeXXL]

well, rescue cds are somewhat ok but they have one major flaw:

up-to-dateness

I won't rely on them but ofc it's always good to have one or two lying around

Originally Posted by Smiling Spectre

Try to reinstall XP. It usually clears all this missing/broken system files for me.

that's usually the way to go but since it's usually the way to go, some nasty ppl made workarounds to annul this.

Keyword: rootkits.

They can hide very good and you might even have them on your PC after a complete reinstallation of Windows.

A pretty good tool to detect and remove rootkits:

http://www.gmer.net/


Another big threat are facebook viruses. Altough mostly kinda old you have many ppl who:



and that shit spreads faster then neutrinos @CERN. The last one I got was pretty interesting. It linked to an jpg but I didn't see anything in the preview@fb. I put the actual scr (haha) in a sandbox and uploaded it to virustotal to let it check from the 40+ scanners there. And it turned out to be something really ugly. (a rly nice keylogger)

If you've got a file upto the size of 20 MB and don't know if it's secure to use, I suggest virustotal.com to you. It's one of my favourite sites on the internets.

But then again even with 40+ scanners you can't be sure to a hundred percent. The most crucial thing is about to be up-to-date. When you've got a new kinda virus (in a secure environment) then Virustotal is a good way to figure out which of the many AV's are the very best and fastest.

Originally Posted by dosraider

Autoplay is TeH eViL !!!!

truer words were never spoken. I'm still surprised how many ppl have autplay activated. I mean this is known since Win95A

Here a very good tool I use for many many years now. There you also can disable autoplay with a single click.

http://xp-antispy.org/en/ (works for Vista and 7 as well)

well there are so much more things you should take a look at if you won't ever come in need to use one of those (pesky) rescue cds

but most important thing is: up-to-dateness. There's a reason for the monthly patch-day. And it's interesting to see how many ppl don't even know neither care about it. But when I take a look at the statistics that most of the botnets with some of the largest amount of pc's are in my country - I'm not surprised at all...

but srsly, it sux when ppl don't care about security because their carelessness can affect you and others. But this creates lots of jobs on the other side, too.