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I browsed around a bit and found this thread in a forum: http://www.pctools.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-66173.html

In which Bianca150 last year posted that they had discovered Stealth KeyLogger 5.0 on a brand new Samsung laptop but assumed it was legit because you could download it from CNET!

Hey, congrats on making a bad situation worse! If you had actually read that webpage, you'd discover that it too was a false-positive. Somebody's cheap AV found a single registry key that was created by the Atheros driver, and flagged it as belonging to a keylogger... a keylogger which, curiously, was missing all of its other registry keys and files.

And again. This guy says Samsung told him it came with the laptop. Dated 05-14-2010

http://www.pctools.com/forum/showthread.php?66173-Spyware-detects-stealth.keylogger-is-it-a-false-positive

I browsed around a bit and found this thread in a forum: http://www.pctools.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-66173.html

In which Bianca150 last year posted that they had discovered Stealth KeyLogger 5.0 on a brand new Samsung laptop but assumed it was legit because you could download it from CNET!

Coincidence or corroboration?

Vik :v)

Hello,

Below is a list of free application software firewalls I put together a while ago. Not sure if they are all current, and I am probably missing quite a few, but it is a starting point.

Firewalls
Active Network - Active Wall Free Edition
Agnitum - Outpost Firewall Free
AS3 Soft4U - AS3 Personal Firewall
Ashampoo - Ashampoo Firewall Free
Comodo Group - Comodo Firewall (now a part of Comodo Internet Security)
FilSecLab - Filseclab Personal Firewall Professional Edition
Group 4 Business Intelligence - IDNWebShield (main web site down when last checked)
NetVeda - NetVeda SafetyNet
PC Tools - PC Tools Firewall Plus Free Edition
PrivacyWare - Privatefirewall
SecurePoint - Securepoint Personal Firewall & VPN Client - (discontinued?)
SoftPerfect - SoftPerfect Personal Firewall
Tall Emu - Online Armor Free - (acquired by EmsiSoft?)
WIPFW Project - WIPFW - (port of BSD IPFW)

Firewall Managers
GT Delphi Components - Windows Firewall Ports & Applications Manager (WFWPAM)
Sheesley, Eric - XPFiremon

Hopefully, this is of help.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Hello,

Below is a list of free application software firewalls I put together a while ago. Not sure if they are all current, and I am probably missing quite a few, but it is a starting point.

Firewalls
Active Network - Active Wall Free Edition
Agnitum - Outpost Firewall Free
AS3 Soft4U - AS3 Personal Firewall
Ashampoo - Ashampoo Firewall Free
Comodo Group - Comodo Firewall (now a part of Comodo Internet Security)
FilSecLab - Filseclab Personal Firewall Professional Edition
Group 4 Business Intelligence - IDNWebShield (main web site down when last checked)
NetVeda - NetVeda SafetyNet
PC Tools - PC Tools Firewall Plus Free Edition
PrivacyWare - Privatefirewall
SecurePoint - Securepoint Personal Firewall & VPN Client - (discontinued?)
SoftPerfect - SoftPerfect Personal Firewall
Tall Emu - Online Armor Free - (acquired by EmsiSoft?)
WIPFW Project - WIPFW - (port of BSD IPFW)

Firewall Managers
GT Delphi Components - Windows Firewall Ports & Applications Manager (WFWPAM)
Sheesley, Eric - XPFiremon

Hopefully, this is of help.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

You can also get there (without the IE-specific settings; at least, the ones that are inherently IE specific) from the control panel.

In Windows XP, Start > Control Panel > Internet Options puts the non-IE-specific settings in the Connections pane along with five panes of web-specific stuff. Was this changed in Windows Vista or Windows 7?

To do us all a public service, I went to check. I've been using Vista fulltime for 3 years, but don't recall any way to reach the proxy page without IE's "Internet Properties" which is tin the same place where "Internet Options" is (in control.exe's classic view.)

I did a search for proxy settings and found a link or two that state these are for Internet Explorer. The first link shows the Windows registry key to apply a restrictions via group policy is mysteriously Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer.

For more proof, though, and pretending the above isn't enough, we can reason that if these "system-wide" control panels were true to the phrase, then why would we need a cookie control GUI in every single alternative browser? It appears that every tab in there is ignored equally: auto-complete, parental controls, popup blocking, running activeX, managing addons, protocol handlers and the default browser --which mysteriously has an IE icon in it and no option to set ANOTHER browser in this particular dialog.

The MacOS 8 of 1997 has an Internet Connection panel to centrally handle many settings, and was followed by browsers. My personal "homepage" should be stored once and for all by default, but we all have to deal with apple choosing their site, MS choosing their own, and firefox pointing to google or mozilla even when I've already told the supposedly central panel where I want to go. No, offering to scan my alternative browser settings is still inferior to forcing everyone to just just look in a registry key. Windows programmers never had hard guidelines to strictly set or to follow. That's why the OS is the twisty little... mess we have today.

By the way, in Vista you cannot reach the above IE settings / proxy control panel from the "Network and Sharing Center," though a proxy is considered a most important part of a network. See?

Don't know if anyone has mentioned this one yet, but I've installed their products on my netbook,
to no ill effect so far. They have 3 free products: Anti-virus, Firewall and Threatfire antimalware.

Website is http://www.pctools.com/

The shareef dont like it

Lockin' the taskbar

Lockin' the taskbar

Really, your password has to be two things: unguessable and unique. Unguessable in that no one can read a quick bio of you and start hammering out children's names or birthplaces and unique in that you're not sharing the same password across multiple hosts. That being said, I use the PC Tools Password tool to generate my passwords. However, this introduces a whole new problem as I now have to maintain and secure a file containing all of these impossible-to-remember passwords that represents the keys to my kingdom.

• Antivirus (use with firewall)
  • NOD32 ESET (fast, reasonably secure)
  • GData (slower, best possible protection)
  • Avira (fast, highly secure, & free version)
• Firewall (use with antivirus & antispyware)
  • Comodo (free, hard to configure)
  • PC Tools (free, easier to configure)
  • Zone Alarm (pay & free versions)
  • Agnitum Outpost (pay)
  • Jetico Firewall (pay & free versions, hard to configure)
• Internet Security Suites
  • Kaspersky
  • GData
  • BitDefender (cheapest)

That and lock down your browser, by installing Firefox, with NoScript, Better privacy, adblock plus, and deny cookies by default, then enable the cookies you want using the cookingSafe extension. Do that no matter what security software you have installed. Or of course you could save yourself a great deal of trouble by using Linux.

Spyware Doctor worked for me. If you can handle the $30 price and this is really driving you crazy, I think it's worth trying. Note that it uses a lot of RAM and CPU cycles.

PC Tools has a free Antivirus at the bottom of that page.

Google Pack has a free Norton Security Scan which is Norton Antivirus Lite with no autoprotect but it does scheduled scans and allows an upgrade to the full version. Also Spyware Doctor which scans for spyware, adware, and rootkits, and allows an upgrade to the full version.

• Comodo - Still in beta, lots of false positives. Configuration is all in local text files, so some level of remote management is possible, but they certainly don't provide the tools for it.
• PC Tools - Requires interaction from the user to do updates, so not a contender.
• ClamAV is free of course, but does not provide a scan-on-access monitor. More suitable for mail servers than workstations.
• Winpooch - uses the ClamAV engine for on-access scanning, project seems dead, never tried it.
• Spyware Terminator - Also does AV using the ClamAV engine. I'd never heard of this one before today, and unfortunately their site design looks a little on the fly-by-night side. They offer a corporate edition with central administration for the wacky price of $2 per seat per year.

So a company that sells security software puts out a press release to say that you still need to buy their software even if you run Vista. I can't think of a single ulterior motive that they might have to do this!

How many of the anti-virus companies don't issue doom-and-gloom style press releases? It is just their way of drumming up business. I would rely on these figures as much as I would rely of Microsoft's "research" that might suggest that Vista is completely immune to any security issue. The truth lies somewhere in between - which shouldn't surprise anybody.

And before anyone jumps down my throat, no Microsoft didn't says Vista was that perfect.

Try the classic search registry key. http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/1067/

What happens if you turn off updating "Last Accessed Time"?

http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/50/

Interestingly, I just replicated this "test." I typed "free undelete utility" into my Google search box in Firefox. The first result (shaded, and clearly marked as a "sponsored link" was pctools.com, for their trialware product "File Recovery." However, the trial version, as plainly indicated on the resulting page http://www.pctools.com/file-recover/?ref=google_fr &gclid=CMu0-tmMo40CFQlQWAodI1nZ6g does NOT recover deleted files.

but you can make him disappear for good and go back to the pefectly fine win2k search interface.

http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/1067 /

• To say it was ugly is going to far it was more like mind numbingly dull. XP helped a little.
• I never much liked the start menu:
  1. Move the mouse pointer to the 'Start' button in the lower left corner,
  2. click,
  3. find the 'Programs' item,
  4. click,
  5. find the program you want,
  6. click.
  The quick-launch bar was a major improvement but I still like the OS.X dock better because of the magnification feature which makes it easier to hit the icon you want and the fact that the dock is simply easier and quicker to use. The new Windows start menu was, if anything worse than the old one. It had some nice features but it was badly organized. My first action on an XP system is always to set it back to 'classic' look .
• The Windows UI behaves in a way that I find infuriating, especially the way that applications steal the focus. This didn't change much with XP. It can be tweaked though.
• Endless reboots. XP was an improvement because it decreased their frequency.
• The endless OK and Apply buttons are annoying. Somehow OS.X and some Linux desktops and even Windows Mobile seem to manage without them.
• The ceaseless stupid questions about whether or not I am sure I want to do this that or the other thing are annoying. I'm not saying they are alwasy unwanted but it would be nice if Microsoft were to reduce their number.
• Having to click one's way through endless configuration app windows to perform simple reconfigurations is annoying. I can modify system preferences in OS.X with far fewer mouse clicks than I can in Windows 2000 or XP.
• When you have a large number of windows open in 2000 and XP finding a particular one is not easy. They tried to solve this in XP by grouping buttons for a particular app. It helped but it wasn't a good solution. I haven't used Vista, but judging from demonstrations of the 'Rolodex' feature they added in to trump 'Exposé' it looks like a huge improvement.

Thank God for IRC?

"Hacker groups have large (compromised) server farms to experiment with propagating exploits. They hide Trojans and viruses, and control these botnets via IRC,"

You're one of them, aren't you?! ADMIT IT!!

Just remember, IRC isn't safe, only safer