Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods

[Gary Baribault <gary () baribault net>]

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