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Re: proactive steps in adware and spyware fields

On Jan 25, 2006, at 3:11 PM, Steven Kolins wrote:

Anyone done much looking at using privoxy and clamav on desktop machines to
filter the web as preliminary steps to being in a position to deal with
adware/spyware rather than assume that someday after it's a problem I'll have
to drop everything and worry. Privoxy cleans up ads and clamav can scan for
viruses (clamxav makes it easy to install on a desktop) and there are glimmers
of using privoxy to scan content with clamav for mime types that suggest
scanning ....

I never heard of privoxy, but just installed it and love it. <http:// www.privoxy.org/> I've always tried to avoid proxies as they add a layer of complexity that isn't usually required, but this is useful enough for me to overcome that aversion. I may even go ahead and set it up as a server so I can manage the client settings from one node.

As for the philosophy of proaction instead of reaction, that is absolutely the right idea for a security paradigm. If all you do is react to crises when they happen, you have... well, Windows. And you can only react to the things you find out about. Much better to just make a solid security scenario from the get go and review it regularly.

That said, privoxy is highly useful to a Mac user right now. Not just because it blocks ads from websites, but also because it blocks all those nasty little privacy violations that are platform-independent, such as webbugs (hidden graphics in e-mails that report to spammers that your address is valid, or other things to other people). It also should effectively open up a noticeable amount of bandwidth for you, since your users aren't spending bandwidth on downloading ads.

I don't see the same benefits to using clam on clients right now, though. I scan incoming e-mails of course, but having it scan all my users' documents all the time is just CPU load that's wasted, as far as I can tell. I'd venture that you'd be better off testing clam and having it ready to deploy, but not actually spending the time and compute time on deploying it right now.
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 >proactive steps in adware and spyware fields (From: "Steven Kolins" <email@hidden>)



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