Infected Website protection...know of any?

AVG is pretty good. I've used it for years and never had any problem.

 

I too have been hit by infected web sites (I call 'em "drive by's"). It only happened one time, but I was Googling for info about a certain video format and when I clicked the web site link, I was infected in under 3 seconds. Luckily, I recognized what was going on and I immediately shut down the PC, unplugged by ethernet cable, and restarted and was able to remove the infection. It was the infamous TDSSServ rootkit, and was a freakin nightmare, but I killed it. This was about a year ago, or more, and I've been looking for protection from this type of infection ever since. AVGs Link Scanner has rec'd bad press for slowing down one's surfing and for generating huge amounts of unneeded web traffic, and WOT has rec'd some bad reviews too, but, then again, everything will have its fans and detractors... I'll be watching this to see how the various options work out for Laura.... Good luck! :-D

 

Theres always the McAfee Site Advisor.

 

How about the idea of visualization?
Sandboxie, geswall and the like?
May not stop the malware from being downloaded, but, will prevent anything from actually infecting the rest of your machine.
http://majorgeeks.com/Sandboxie_d4993.html
http://www.gentlesecurity.com/

Or even 'drop my rights' which lets you run your web browsers etc with limited user privileges thus malware can't install in the drive by fashion
some good background on this here:
http://cybercoyote.org/security/drop.shtml

I know these are not quite what was being asked for in the first place, its just a different sort of approach to this 'drive by' style of infection...

 

I ran into one of those "drive by's "myself about a week ago from trying out a different proxy site than the one that i normally use,on account of the web site being down temporarily,(I use it to troll on a local forum that displays your ISP location)the page came up OK,pasted my link to they're URL tab,took me to the page,when all of a sudden this collage of loud blaring music started playing!!!,.. the Avast popped up and reported that the page was viral (i cant recall the name of it,it was an http something)and prompted me to abort the connection,which i did,the page disappeared but the music was still blaring, so then i tried to exit the browser(FF)and it didn't close ,so then i got to the task Mgr,which finally closed the page after a a couple of frantic attempts ,after which immediately i scheduled a boot scan that came back clean,I still wasn't sure about it, so i performed a real time full scan that showed no infections, but the point is that spyblaster & spybot really let me down ,I just installed the link scanner that Dom suggested to Laura,but without the toolbar,although it says that I'm protected,..so i think that it still runs without the toolbar,the only thing that i have to do manually is to paste a link on the interface to pre'check it if i want to before i link to it .
Thanks for the tip Domluc

mimon

 

I don't think much of Sandboxie myself, but, was pleasantly surprised with Geswall's usability...

Drop my rights is probably the most lightweight idea as a means of protection, but not without its quirks either.

Or...
Have you thought of No-script as a browser addon?
where you only allow scripts to run from trusted sites.

http://noscript.net/

 

Good thread. I'll have to read up on the links provided but from what I understand, any legit site can be affected by these 'drive-by's, correct?

@mimon Totally off topic, that is a great album! Happened to listen to it today.

 

My understanding is yes, any site can be hacked & or compromised, but, I guess a lot depends on how tight their security is.
Smaller sites aren't as likely to have as many security measures in place and thus easier targets

 

The only problem I can see with all the link scanners, WOT, spyware blaster, spybot immunization is that 'bad guys' can stay a step ahead at any given second. It doesn't take much to register a domain and start it all over again. With spybot it takes until Wendsday to get protected, WOT relies on the people using it (I think) etc, etc I think you get my drift.

 

Very true, hence the suggestions I put out there

Check out geswall, its better than you may think

 

I wonder that no one has suggested running your browser in a Virtual Machine.

http://www.technibble.com/how-to-create-a-windows-xp-virtual-machine/

 

Ya OK, but one needs ample CPU and RAM for that. I'm running VMWare now though with Ubuntu on there. Let's call it a dual CPU and 2 gigs, many don't have that option but you do make sense as everything's isolated.

 

I thought Laura had a posh new PC.

Sorry If I'm wrong.

I think Windows 7 will have this anyway.

?Halo?

 

Microsoft has promised Christmas will come early this year (October).

roflmao

 

to studiot
In regards to your post #24 regarding a virtual machine, I think #13 could cover that.

 

Ha, but I called it visualization... any friendly mods want to correct that for me? :-o
I did mean virtualization... really, honest... :innocent