Spyware Contorl

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Spyware Contorl

This is an excerpt from a forum post regarding spyware on Security Focus's website:

From: Gary Baribault <gary@baribault.net>

Date: January 7, 2005 12:20:48 PM CST

To: Illuminatus Master <illuminatus.master@gmail.com>

Cc: incidents@securityfocus.com

Subject: Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods

The first obvious answer is to follow many people's lead and go with

Firefox. I have replaced IE on many customer's installations.

The next solution or in combination with the first is to create Ghost

images and just ghost people's machines when their beyond repair.

Gary B

On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 12:37 -0500, Illuminatus Master wrote:

Hello List,

I'm sure you all realize the growing threat of malware and spyware to

Internet Explorer. It has been my experience that the initial

infection and/or removel of an infection by anti-spyware products can

permanently damage a windows workstation. This damage occurs in many

forms and often leads too the workstation being reformatted and

rebuilt before going back into service.

A recent example is earlier this week, in spite of content filtering,

a workstation was infected with "wintools", "mysearchtoolbar" etc. The

tough part of this is that such malware has multiple instances/threads

and renames system files like msconfig to resist removal. Often

IE/Windows is so damaged it's more time effiecient to just replace the

box and rebuild the infected one.

My question is this, I'm batting around the idea of using Group Policy

in our Active Directory to try and choke IE down to the point where

such Malware has trouble installing itself. Has anyone here ever tried

such as this with any degree of success?

Other than Group Policy I'm also considering deploying an alternate

web browser that isnt subject to malware infection but doing so

complicates my patching/reporting routine for our security audits.

I look forward to your comments and idea's.

Thanks,

massa

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