It seems that every month we uncover another tool to help us combat security threats.  My last post I discussed the various types of security threats and what they can do.  So how do you combat and rid your systems of these infections?  There are hundreds of anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-rootkit, etc. products both for sale and for free.  Lets talk about a few of them both paid and free.  A couple caveats, the free ones are typically not as good as the for pay ones but can be very useful.  Also, be weary of any products from software vendors you don’t recognize, many of these products are actually the bad stuff.

In my previous post I discussed the difficulties our company faces protecting our clients from security threats on the Internet.  To dive into this further I want to discuss the differences between different kinds of security threats.  First off, all security threats were written with bad intentions.  Viruses, malware, adware, rootkits, trojans, etc. were written by a malicious software developer for some personal or corporate gain.  For instance, many of these programs are written to try and get you to divulge personal information (social security numbers, addresses, phones numbers) or financial information (credit card or bank account numbers).  In other instances the software programmer wrote the program to try and cause harm to a corporation.  This has been scene with a common infection that caused websites and personal computers to attack corporate websites like Yahoo.com or Google.com.  The computers were set up as “bots” to send erroneous website requests to these major company’s in the hopes that the servers hosting the websites would be overwhelmed with requests and crash.

On a regular basis I find myself fighting spyware on a client’s machine.  I keep asking myself is there a better way to protect against this?  Should I use a different antivirus or antispyware vendor?  Should we instate policies to prevent people from browsing the web and only allow them to go to very specific sites?