Entertainment Podium

Stop Drive-By Download:Stop Spyware

This morning when i switched  on my computer i found that it was taking a longer time to boot up than usual, and once it booted up, i was greeted by a pernicious popup instead of my regular desktop wall paper. After trying to close the popup a zillion times, i just gave up on it and tried to open my Internet Explorer to check the internet connection. It was working!! Not only was it working, it was working out of its way to serve unwanted web pages to me and kept redirecting me to different websites. After playing around with it for a while i decided to give it up as i was running short of time, I was getting late for work. This computer problem was on top of my mind for most part of my so-called productive day. Not that i have lots of sensitive information on my computer but because of the fact  that i did not do anything out of the ordinary to cause that problem. Later that evening, lucky for me, a friend of mine who is a security consultant dropped in at my place for dinner. Not only did he fix my computer but also he explained what caused it in the first place. Now am sharing this little information with you so that you know what you are dealing with when you are online.

Drive-By Download is the technology that allows for automated installation of Activex controls (a special kind of plug-in program for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser) when you access a certain web page. You dont have to click on any pop-ups on the website, you dont have to download anything from the website, merely accessing the website causes all these problems. Sometimes you may get a message saying that “This site requires activex controls” and once you install the activex from the website a spyware program launches itself in your computer, sometimes even that is not required. Infoworld says that Google crawled such websites and found nearly 3 million such pages, all ready to serve spyware programs on your computer. Even legitimate sites can be hacked and used for serving malicious content. Further research shows that popular websites become easy targets like the site for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, expedia.com and rhapsody.com. So what is the Antivirus industry’s reply to this??

Symantec,AVG and other popular antivirus companies have started researching on malicious websites and have upgraded their latest programs and have bundled Internet security add-ons for Internet Explorer to check the websites with vulnerabilities and block them or warn the before you interact with such websites. Another initiative from the security major, Symantec, is the launch of Norton Safe web website and plugin for Norton Internet Security 2009. This years Norton product keeps getting better by the day.

Another popular Internet Security plugin is WOT - Web Of Trust, it is an old player in this field and has till now rated 20,357,313 websites and has found 1,312,898 sites that are malicious. The best part is, it is available as a free download.

I personally use Norton to protect my computer and have upgraded to Norton internet security 2009 with the Norton Safe web plugin. Am feeling safe and protected now, What are you waiting for?

Tags: internet security, Norton safe web, spyware, web of trust