Gidday Am

Quote Originally Posted by ameerat42 View Post
This part of the post is an aside to the main theme of the thread, but relevant because of the thread title.


I can't agree, John. My OWN experience - rather than "street talk" - tells me quite the opposite. I know you have fairly good computer experience, but spare a thought for people who
do not.
I have spent most of my working life doing just this, some 40+ years, both in my own business and profession and working for what was then the largest organisation in Australia ...

I am very hot on securing computers from all angles.

Two important points for others who read this:
1. How long will Win XP and Win 7 be supported with security updates? What happens when you go on the
internet after that? - Win XP is already unsupported.
Agreed, but the OS has precious little to do with Internet security. e.g. Both Internet Explorer and Google Chrome see nothing whatsoever wrong with allowing some sites to put 10+ third party tracking cookies on one's computer/s. Running Ghostery as a plugin to Firefox (as well as something like AdBlock Plus) blocks all this garbage. MS and Google see nothing wrong with allowing all their mates to party on one's hardware and in one's software, apparently!

Any time over the last 20 years MS could have blocked execution of all code from the Internet download and temp folders, the user and system temp folders and MS Outlook. They have never done so. This is still not done by default, is hard for an end user to do, and is the primary route of infection for malware of all descriptions. I have edited the registries on all my PCs to make execution from these locations impossible. It adds a layer of irritation, in that the user has to copy the file wanted to another disk location from which execution is allowed, then run the file from there. What is the chance of even a naive user doing this with a file they do not recognise?

Have you ever seen a computer trashed by ransomware? I have. It's really, really ugly ...

2. The FREE Win7/8.x to Win 10 upgrade ends this July. By the time people have figured out that it's worthwhile, they
will have to PAY for it.
Agreed that the decision will have to be made by then for it to be "free".

However, I would rather pay for something that doesn't force 'updates' on me, and/or open doors into all sorts of sensitive and confidential personal and client information on my computers ...

End of aside.


Am.
Mate, I am not any kind of Luddite, and take security extremely seriously. I urge others to do the same. I have at least six layers of security before anything even gets to the Windows execution security. This latter I see as a mere irritation, as it does nothing to prevent programs running using the alternate streams technology built in to all versions of NT. Apparently, MS are happy for malignant code to be downloaded and installed on one's computer/s, then try to prevent it from running at the USER level!! What a joke.

And don't start me on Apples. Just two weeks ago I had a fellow tell me that he didn't have any viruses on his Apple computer, and there was no need to run AV software because "Apples couldn't get viruses"! What a joke. How would he even know when he isn't running AV s/w ... ?

I recommend Malwarebytes for Mac or Windows, available from here:
https://www.malwarebytes.org/antimalware/mac/ or here:
https://www.malwarebytes.org/antimalware/

Use the 30 day free trial of the full version (real time protection) and run a scan of the entire computer. This will usually take many hours. If it finishes in 20-40 minutes, you have only performed a "quick" scan ...

Hope some of this drivel helps someone.