XP guardian

So today I managed to acquire the XP Guardian trojan. I think I've gotten rid of it, but was wondering if anyone had any reliable information on the best recent free antivirus and spyware removal tools. I've traditionally used AVG and Spybot, and between them they've generally kept my system healthy. Are there any other decent programs or utilities I should be using?

avg

malware bytes

spybot

adaware

if you run all 4 of those and it's still on there then there's no hope.

microsoft's security essentials is very good. all you need really. don't get avg or any other free antivirus.

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/

I've been using the Microsoft one and it actually works pretty well

Fortinet do a free version of it's FortiClient software which is pretty good. The firewall will stop pretty much anything dodgy trying to get in or out and seems to pick up far more than anything else I've used. The only thing is that it can be a bit too protective and will probably give you a few false positives.

http://download.cnet.com/FortiClient-Endpoint-Security-Free-Edition/3000-2239_4-10519418.html?tag=mncol

Thanks for the replies. I'll give the Microsoft Security Essentials a whirl. Normally I've always been skeptical of MS's own defenses, I haven't even heard of this one. I take it it's pretty new since this is v1.0

On another note, a question for XP users: recently it seems both my desktop and netbook have been downloading and installing updates pretty much daily... this used to be a once-every-few-weeks kind of thing, but for the last 2-3 months they have been incessant. Are there really so many recently-exploited holes in XP to require so many updates?

  On 2/13/2010 at 10:32 PM, Ron Manager said:

On another note, a question for XP users: recently it seems both my desktop and netbook have been downloading and installing updates pretty much daily... this used to be a once-every-few-weeks kind of thing, but for the last 2-3 months they have been incessant. Are there really so many recently-exploited holes in XP to require so many updates?

no, generally there aren't that many updates. this could be a lot of things, and it might help if you google the specific updates it is giving you to see if other people have the same issue. could be something like this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941729/

Once a system has been compromised, there's no way to know if you've really got everything out. Better to format and reinstall.

  On 2/13/2010 at 10:36 PM, underscore said:

  On 2/13/2010 at 10:32 PM, Ron Manager said:

On another note, a question for XP users: recently it seems both my desktop and netbook have been downloading and installing updates pretty much daily... this used to be a once-every-few-weeks kind of thing, but for the last 2-3 months they have been incessant. Are there really so many recently-exploited holes in XP to require so many updates?

 

no, generally there aren't that many updates. this could be a lot of things, and it might help if you google the specific updates it is giving you to see if other people have the same issue. could be something like this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941729/

Yeah I did wonder if it was something that was failing to install everytime, but the fact that it is happening on two different PCs was puzzling... will have to look into it.

  On 2/13/2010 at 10:36 PM, chaosmachine said:

Once a system has been compromised, there's no way to know if you've really got everything out. Better to format and reinstall.

Yeah, this is generally the approach I take, and reformat will take place when I have time. But I'm too busy at the moment to spend a great deal of time reinstalling everything, so I've just double-checked my back-ups and patched it up, hopefully it will last a few weeks.