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Using Security Tools Tutorials
Host Security / Anti-Malware
Subtitles of the Movie (Using Security Tools / Host Security / Anti-Malware)
Another tool that we want to talk about, really a family of tools and that's anti-malware tools. Now, we're going into, in particular, a tool called Ad-Aware 2008 but understand that there are dozens of really good anti-malware products out there. Some are ones that you pay for and get a license for and some are free and some are the kind where they're free but you can upgrade to the professional version and get a lot more features, better support and so forth and Ad-Aware is one of those programs; really good free program that you can get and eliminates a really good amount of spyware and adware and so forth. That's its job is to detect and eliminate malware. Now, it doesn't really detect and eliminate viruses. That's what an anti-virus program is for and that's why I kind of recommend that you use actually both; you use anti-virus software such as MacAfee, Symantec, ABG Free, Clam or whatever you like, whatever your favorite is and you supplement that with an anti-malware program such as Ad-Aware for example. Some other good examples could be Spy Patrol and there's also Spybot Search and Destroy. These are all alternatives that are just as good as Ad-Aware and the reason I recommend that you do this is not every product detects everything. Even some of the better anti-virus products out there don't detect every single virus that's out there and they don't detect every single piece of malware out there. So you kind of want to supplement your anti-virus or other anti-malware products with another product as well that catches different things. We're going to do a demonstration in particular of Ad-Aware 2008 but understand, there are dozens of really good programs out there. So let's go ahead and take a look at Ad-Aware 2008. Now, we're in our Windows XP Professional box and we're actually still in safe mode from our previous session so one of the good things about all of these Ad-Aware programs or anti-malware programs rather is that they function really well in Windows normal mode but what you want is a program that also works very well in safe mode and the reason you want that is because you can't always clean some viruses and malware in normal mode. Sometimes it requires booting in the safe mode and the reason that is the case is that in safe mode, very minimal Windows services and drivers are running so a lot of malware and viruses can't be cleaned when they're in normal mode because they're running processes they've started. In safe mode, that's not the case. They cannot start or run in safe mode so they're vulnerable to being cleaned up by a really good anti-malware program. And Ad-Aware is one of those programs that will run in safe mode. You, of course, want to update its definitions on a regular basis before you need them, actually before you need to clean something up do that and you can do the automatic update thing of course but you can also manually update them wherever you like. You want to update it before you need it so that when you go into safe mode where you might not necessarily have a network or Internet connection, you're still going to have updated anti-virus and anti-malware signatures. So once you get there, what you would do is just go ahead and start the scan and you can tell it what kind of scan you want and a lot of anti-malware programs have some of these same options; a smart scan that only scans certain critical files and processes and then a full scan that will look at the entire system. Now, if you're really infected you might want to do that full scan. If you're just checking things occasionally in normal mode, smart scan is probably OK. But I tend to do a full scan more often than anything else. You can also, if you suspect a particular folder or file is infected, you can do a custom scan and tailor that scan to what you would like to be checked. We can go ahead and do a full scan and also schedule a scan also, by the way and I would recommend that you do this on a normal basis when you're in normal mode when you're not infected. But I'm showing you, the technique I'm showing you now is how to do this when you are infected and you may not necessarily can clean a piece of malware in normal mode. That's why we're in safe mode as you can see from here from the top. Let's go ahead and start the scan and it's going to go ahead and start and it's going to scan the entire drive. We've told it a full scan. We've got an updated definitions file so it's going to start the scan and then we're going to be able to do this in safe mode and that's a very good thing because you'll be able to catch and eliminate a lot of malware that you might not normally catch in normal mode. It started to scan, as you can see, so it's scanning the registry and some other files as well and it's going to go through and scan the file system, registries, processes, certain key things on the computer and that's what you want. You want to go through and do a thorough job of getting rid of malware wherever it's at. So we're going to go ahead and let it scan for a few minutes and then we'll take a look at what the scan results are. OK, our Ad-Aware scan is complete. It didn't really find a lot of things to be honest with you. No critical objects, privacy objects it found a few things and those are primarily cookies and so forth and we can actually go ahead and click Finish. It detected 14 items all together and total scanning time of ten minutes and this was, this is a very small hard drive with not a lot installed so it would take longer on a machine that has a bigger hard drive and lots of programs. Let's go ahead and click Finish and it's going to tell us, it's going to ask us how it wants to handle these objects. Let's click No here and let's make sure that we've got everything selected here and we do and we're going to remove everything. And we can set a system restore point that'll go back to a previous state if there's a problem. We can go ahead and scan again or do a wide variety of things. Let's go ahead and close it for now and that's actually what, an example of what a really good anti-malware program is, especially one that will run in safe mode in Windows and help you detect and eliminate those types of malware that might not be so easily removed from normal mode.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Using Security Tools |
| Author: | Bobby Rogers |
| SKU: | 34068 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-88-2 |
| Release Date: | 2009-12-04 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 91 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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