Playing with firewalls

Got your own spyware horror story?

My brother had an unfortunate experience with LimeWire that required professional assistance and over $100 to fix. Not wanting anything to do with spyware, I rooted around on the Net for a good firewall. I found one all right. Unfortunately for me, it was stuffed to the gills with spyware. Luckily, some of my favorite programs stopped most of the malware, but one particularly nasty little bugger persisted. It was the worst computer experience I've ever experienced.

This particular spyware would pop up every two seconds and ask if a particular action I was taking, such as starting a program, was acceptable. It would ask this question over again and again, which made running spyware scans impossible. Every time I tried to scan a file, the program would stop the scan and ask for approval.

Eventually, I started up in Safe Mode. Once I was in Safe Mode, I ran Spyware Doctor, eTrust PestPatrol, Ad-Aware SE Personal, and a disc defragmenter, all at the same time. All those scans took over five hours to complete, but when they had finished and I restarted my machine--a four-year-old Dell PC--I was clean. I've never been able to find out which program did the damage, but from now on, I download programs from verifiable, legitimate sources.

-Cameron
Scarsdale, New York, U.S.A.

Reply from the Download.com editors:

It definitely sounds like you got a rogue firewall program that tried a little too hard. If you want a verifiable and legitimate firewall, look no further than ZoneAlarm. While no firewall is perfect, the free downloadable version of this program is probably all the protection you'll need against most attacks, and a recent Download.com feature offers some basic tips on how to get ZoneAlarm up and running.

One thing about ZoneAlarm (and other firewall programs) is you'll need to train it on which programs are allowed to access the Internet and which are not. Unfortunately, this means that in the beginning, a window will pop up every time a program tries to access the Internet. The solution for programs that you recognize (like IE or Yahoo Messenger) is to check the box that says "don't ask me again" and then hit the Accept button. If you're notified of a program that's trying to access the Internet that you don't recognize, then it's probably time to run your spyware scans to make sure no bad guys have snuck past your defenses.

As for dangerous downloads, please be assured that Download.com is committed to offering a safe, trusted, and secure Web site for software, games, music, and video downloads. We take several steps of evaluating every file before we list it on our site. Of course we aren't perfect and make occasional mistakes, but we are continually striving to offer a library of downloadable content that is completely safe and secure. For more information about our listing policies, please see our notice about adware and spyware.

Also, for the sake of stability (and sanity), we can't recommend running all of those security applications simultaneously. While we do recommend using more than one spyware-removal program, running them concurrently will only cause confusion. Using Safe Mode is a good idea--just run the applications one at a time.