Comcast is telling me that one or more of my computers may be infected with a bot

[Orrex]

Should I believe them? In the same email they're pitching a bot-finding service, for a nominal fee.

I ran SpyBot just yesterday and came up clean, aside from a few tracking cookies.


Any recommendations?

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. download another good freebie - Malwarebyte - I use that as well as spybot search and destroy.

run it - then decide if you want to trust the Comcast pitch.

[Posteritatis]

2. There's *always* a free way of clearing those things off one's comps

If you've got Spybot (or Malwarebytes - I kinda like that more these days) and any decent antivirus program you should be okay.

Whenever I see advertising saying I "may" be infected with something and can find out for sure if I give someone some money, I assume I'm just seeing a sales pitch instead of an actual diagnosis.

[Orrex]

3. Yeah, and if it's a diagnosis, who gave them permission to scan my system?

Last edited Thu Jun 28, 2012, 09:37 AM - Edit history (1)

I downloaded Malwarebytez and turned out to have a few malicious programs that SpyBot didn't catch. Fixed them easily enough, so it looks like I've found my new favorite protection software!

[Posteritatis]

4. The scans are almost always fake.

MWB's fantastic; I mostly use Spybot for the immunization parts of its program and MWB for cleaning stuff up. Between the two I'll go months without finding anything on this comp that shouldn't be there.

[daaron]

5. Windows, I take it?

Could be legit. Hard to say. Do as others in thread suggested - personally I used Avast! Antivirus (free version) on my Windows machine, before I got sick of constant malware threats and switched it to Linux.

[MicaelS]

6. I also suggest CCleaner

This can remove a bunch of crap in your registry, plus clean up browser history, cookies etc. Extremely powerful and free tool.

http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER