Spyware/Adware Prevention In Large Deployments?

foQ writes "I work in the IS department for a ~2000 networked computer environment across 10 locations. As with most people, we have experienced serious problems with spyware/adware. We have SpyBot and Ad-Aware installed on most computers, but this doesn't prevent the computers from getting these programs and only sometimes properly removes all of them. Is there a tool that we could push out to all the PCs to basically do what anti-virus programs do and block these programs from running and clean them from the computer?"

Comments

Re:Easy solution

[mrmagos]

As the security administrator of a small liberal arts college, this switch has probably made the largest impact on desktop support issues. Unfortunately, you can't fully remove IE, but removing shortcuts seems to be good enough to prevent most end users from using it. The other consideration is that many sites use IE-specific extensions, which breaks how Firefox renders the page. For example, we use Exchange with the Outlook web client for student email access and web access. The client is useable with Firefox, but some features, like the check name applet, does not work. A desktop url opened in IE is our workaround... I guess my point is that you really need to review which web apps and sites your users want to access to truly weigh the pros and cons. In our case, the benefits were greater, and we made the transition as gracefully as possible. I know the parent means well, but sometimes the solution isn't that easy.

Did you pay for it?

[killjoe]

So you installed ad aware and spybot on most of 2000 systems. Did you pay the authors of those software any money? Maybe if you paid them some money they could help you roll out massive deployments or modify their software to suit you.

My guess is that like most companies you installed them without paying because you didn't have to fill out forms or break your budget. Now you are looking to pay somebody else for software after using their products for all this time.

Just doesn't seem fair.

Re:Obvious solution

[Frogbert]

No it is not. There is no Microsoft Word for Linux, Open Office comes close and I love it to death but its just not ready yet.

There is no god damned Access for Linux either. Heres a newsflash a lot of companies have database frontends that rely on Access, it may not be the best solution but it is the current system and to change it would cost thousands of dollars.

Like it or Loathe it Visual Basic is used throughout many companies. Please correct me if I am wrong but do any Linux office products work with Visual Basic?

These are just a few of the many examples why you couldn't just switch to Linux like that. Those are just the software factors too, forget user training, the cost of changing hardware that isn't supported to Linux etc.

What about thousands of pissed off users because they can't figure out why the hell the start button looks different or why text on the screen doesn't behave as expected.

I'm not trolling, I like Linux I think it is great for the home and for a hobby but its just not ready for the mainstream. Perhaps in a few years, but not today.