Viruses, Malware, and Spyware - What to do?
The new Microsoft Security Essentials is also a good protection layer to have. I've got it on one of my computers at home and it's been performing well, and it isn't a resource-hog - which is good.
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Viruses, Malware, and Spyware - What to do?
The new Microsoft Security Essentials is also a good protection layer to have. I've got it on one of my computers at home and it's been performing well, and it isn't a resource-hog - which is good.
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Removal of an unwanted item?
Tool bars are normally a BHO, or browser helper object. There are tools to manage BHO's, a good free one is spybot search and destroy, under the advanced mode.
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Ant toolbar - malware or not?
I have been using the toolbar like months now and I have no problems with it. You can try it in firefox if you have problems in Internet Explorer.
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How Big a Security Risk are Browser Extensions?
Internet Explorer Browser Helper Objects are extremely unsafe. They basically allow the browser to run native code, which could be anything. I'm not sure if they're still as pervasive now as they were in years past, but they're one of the reasons why Internet Explorer is so much less secure than Firefox and other browsers.
Mozilla style plug-ins using XUL and Microsoft's Silverlight plug-ins are sandboxed to try and prevent malicious behavior. Ultimately it rests on the developer's reputation for any kind of software to be deemed trustworthy by its users, however. Even in cases where the developer is not trying to write malware, bugs in the program may expose security exploits.
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