hi - first of all, this question is not for me. i maintain the PC of someone who surfs porn regularly and their computer keeps getting - excuse the pun - F'd up. up until last week i've been able to remedy it by just running spybot/ad aware and some lite regedit maintenance. last week her IE browser got hijacked in what has turned out to be a week long fix of many HJT logs. i only had one small step left to completely liberate her pc when she calls this morning (i had just remoted into her PC last night and all was well) to tell me she is getting a million porn windows and now she cannot even open IE. i tried to remote in but it wouldn't let me, i suspect because she got knocked off her cable modem or blocked in some way.

here's my question: what software (doesn't matter if it's paid or free) would you recommend to arm and protect her computer from malicious spyware/adware/trojans/virus when she is surfing for porn? i've delicately brought this up a few times with her with not much luck. i have resigned myself to the fact that this is going to continue and i would like to make my job as easy as possible.

what can i do to protect? thanks for any help!!!!!!

Spywareblaster
AV (AVG, Mcafee, Kapersky, Avast, Nod32)
IE-Spyad
Spybot
Ad-aware

Not much more you can do after that. Malware will still get in unfortunately especially if they surf porn sites

okay - thanks for the response. would you recommend me moving her from IE over to firefox?

Absolutely.
Firefox does not use ActiveX, and because relatively unused, malware is not written to attack it as much as it is with IE. It is also a BETTER browser. However, your friend absolutely MUST keep current on the IE security patches, since it is part of the Windows operating system,
I trust, as well, that your friend also has a resident firewall; if not, I could recommend the free version of Sygate Personal Firewall.
You might want to print out one of the Tutorials on computer security and give it to her:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial82.html



Regards,
John

CCleaner is pretty useful, if you can get her to run it everytime she's been surfing. It will remove all the cache info.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

Start Charging for your services it always works

EDIT: Err wasn't very helpful sorry it was just first thing that came to mind. Hope your computer gets Locked down and protected

Make sure she disables both install on demand in IE>Tools>Internet Options>Advanced. Also tell here NOT to run any video previews, they can be deadly. Put a-squared Free on her machine to protect against trojans which are a big problem with those websites.

will definately install firefox. as far as firewall she is just using the default one in windows. i hesitate to have her use zone alarm - which is what i use - because all the pop ups asking if you want to allow this or that will alarm her. she is very basic in her PC knowledge. she has trouble attaching a file to an email. so i need a firewall that won't be prompting her to decide whether or not to allow something in.

does something like this exist?

p.s. yes i charge her

All the free firewalls allow you to disable the alerts except for those alerts associated with the first attempt by a new program to access the internet. You can also tell her how to place the checkmark so as not to be advised of a particular alert again.