Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Virus scanner and Firewall for Windows

Nick Chalk wrote:
> Hello all.
>
> One of my esteemed colleagues has come up with a
> plan to move a few of his staff to a new building
> for three months. Given this short period, it's
> not economical to install a phone line and ADSL,
> so the suggestion is to equip them with laptops
> and 3G cards.
>
> These will, unfortunately, be running WinXP, so
> need virus checkers and firewalls.
>
> May I tap the collected wisdom of HantsLUG for
> recommendations in these two categories, please?
>
> Ideally, both pieces of software will allow
> advance configuration, and present no questions to
> the user thereafter.

I use Sygate personal firewall which *does* prompt the user
on a case by case basis. Not ideal in this situation but works for me
and has caught and stopped "call homes" in everything from gizmo to
the raw driver for my fuji camera :-(

I also use clamwin which from past experience with infected
"windogs" picks up more stuff than any of the very expensive
packages we paid for. One systems had over 43 infections
overnight and only clamwin found 43 - norton et.al averaged
around 25 each :-(

Also you can install clamav under samba - which should give you an alert
if any of these boxes attempt to write infected files onto a samba share
- it may be worth creating a writable share for these machines only
so that you have first knowledge of any infections that attempt to
"spread by share".

Personally I would backup all machines and vape and restore after the
three months - just to be sure.

Jacqui