Virus / Firewall recommendations?

[SLR_65]

Hi Guys,

I recently loaded up XP Pro SP2 on the HTPC. Basically the HTPC runs GBPVR and gets the schedule info from Schedules Direct. I occasionally will check my email via mail2web on it and check in here with it.

I've been working some overtime so I haven't been home as much as normal.

This morning I booted the machine up and got an icon in the system tray that said the computer was infected and to click there to fix it, and of course it was a trojan giving a false warning. It was "XP Antivirus 2009". I found some software to remove it and things seem well, for now.

I'm not sure how this got loaded onto the machine - none of my kids will fess up to using it, so I dunno if one of them used it and visited a site they shouldn't, or if the thing just "found" my computer sitting relatively unprotected on the net and installed it's self.

I do have Windows Defender running and Windows Firewall, and I upgraded to SP3 but that's it. I basically didn't want to load it down with a bunch of stuff when it's just going to be recording TV and updating the TV Guide.

Sooo, the question is - how safe is the HTPC sitting on the net? What protection programs work well with GBPVR? Any other measures anyone would care to share I'd appreciate!

Also . . . I have a 700gb Seagate SATA drive right now, but I also have an unused Western Digital 40gb ide drive - should I install it and load the operating system and programs on it and just use the SATA drive for data storage?

Any thoughts, comments, etc. would be much appreicated!

Thanks!

Steve

[ACTCMS]

I run XP SP2 on my GBPVR server from a 40Gb IDE drive with a 500Gb IDE for recordings - I use the 40Gb for live TV directory - works fine.

I Use XP firewall on the server - it's also running behind a domain server and then my router firewall - I use AVG free, Winpatrol and SpyBot S&D on all my XP machines - so far so good.

A mate of mine had an XP AntiVirus 2008 problem recently and I fixed it by using Winpatrol to disable the malware at startup and SpyBot to clean it up.

Alex

[Graham]

You have probably noticed the thread talking about how http://www.gbpvr.com got hacked and much muttering about PDF files. For me, it wasn't PDF. I got a popup trying to send an email or somesuch. The Joomla forums (Joomla was the tool used in gbpvr.com (or not?)) contains muttering about XP Antivirus 2009. I suspect that we all have different symptoms of the same hack.

Anyway, I always recommend AVG Free from Grisoft becuase it has kept the various computers used by my teenage daughter safe for years despite a zillion music downlaods (and I don't want to know what else!).

IMHO, Don't bother with the disk --- the gain ain't worth the pain.

I'm agnostic about firewalls. I think that they are more trouble than they are worth and I will continue to think that until some horror trashes my hard drive.

Good Luck

[SLR_65]

No, I wasn't aware of the GBPVR home page hack! I did notice the other day that it was down and apparently being updated though - guess a virus will force that!

That may have been where it was picked up. Oh well, there's nothing earth shaking on my HTPC so a reformat and reload isn't a big deal.

The 40 gig drive . . . I have it spare and it's not that hard to install. I was thinking it would be faster to format and stuff in the case of a reload needing to be done. Also, I could reload while not losing my programs, though when I reloaded I would probably have to move them to the videos directory as the GBOVR database for them would be gone?

Thanks for the info!

Steve

[Graham]

That may have been where it was picked up. Oh well, there's nothing earth shaking on my HTPC so a reformat and reload isn't a big deal.

I'd run an AVG scan before you do a rebuild. You may find that AVG will clean it.

[Spag Bol]

Get a good virus scanner/firewall. I like Kaspersky - they have both a virus scanner product and one with a virus scanner/firewall.

I also prefer to use a hardware firewall as part of my router to generally keep people out of the machines on my LAN. I use a Buffalo router running DD-WRT (an embedded Linux distribution).

[pcostanza]

I have Bitdefender on my home systems and AVG 8 on my office systems. I use SuperAntiSpyware & Spybot. Never any problems>>>>knock on wood.