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March 26, 2007 By Reid Goldsborough
All is not doom and gloom. For individual PC users, there are preventive measure to help ensure your PC doesn't become a zombie:
1. Keep your operating system up to date. If you're running Windows, configure Windows Update to install security patches automatically.
2. Keep your other programs up to date as well, installing updates as they become available.
3. Use an Internet security suite such as McAfee Internet Security Suite, Symantec's Norton Internet Security, or Trend Micro Internet Security, and keep it up to date as well.
McAfee Internet Security Suite comes bundled for free with some Internet service providers (ISPs), such as Comcast and MSN, and it includes the most important but not all of the protections in the full version. If you have a subscription with such an ISP, and you want to use the free security protection, you have to install them from the ISP's Web site.
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This problem will continue to grow until such time that a quick, simple and free test for zombie behavior is published and made widely available. It's not enough to piouly say that you need to keep your software patched, up to date and have a security suite. That's kind of like urging children to clean their room. Always a vituous suggestion but one that's hard to enforce. Thanks, Ed Kennedy
I agree with Mr. Kennedy's comment that we need a reliable, free means of determining if our PC's have become zombies. Logicians and philosophers tell us, though, that it is almost impossible to prove a negative. In other words, we can prove an infected computer is infected, but we can't prove a clean computer is clean. The PC security industry certainly has a difficult job.
I couldn't agree more with Ed's comment. Microsoft should have made a simple test available long ago for zombie behavior. I'd go further, though - Windows is so full of holes, the only way for Microsoft to begin to do penance is to make zombie fixes available on its update site. Recommending patches is good in theory, but really breaks down when one considers the number of alerts over the past several years about whether XP SP1 was safe and/or reliable, whether XP SP2 was safe and/or reliable, viruses / malware that mimics Windows update alerts, and so on. While some have blamed conflicting security alerts for this, I believe Microsoft deserves the bulk of the blame for letting its paying public complete its beta testing process and then not making effective fixes available. Security patches are only a bandaid - the problem is that they amount to closing the barn door after the animals have escaped.