Hi Roy,
These are my suggestions, for what they're worth.
Firstly, seeing your wife's computer appears to be infected with some
virus or trojan, you should advise her of what the potential damage it
could cause is. Recording transaction details, credit card numbers, key
strokes etc. Let her know that all her personal records and information
are potentially at risk as things stand.
The best thing until a proper fix can be made is to take the machine off
line.
Now, your wife needs to understand that Windows is by it's very nature
vulnerable to attack, and has no real inbuilt protection. Protection can
take two forms; the first is software that makes educated guesses as to
what is or is not a safe event or file. The second is software that can
respond to known threats.
The software that makes educated guesses will not get it right all the
time. It can block processes that are legitimate, often presenting
annoying windows asking a "did you do this?" sort of question.
The software that will respond to known threats can only make responses
after the threats are known by the software publisher, an appropriate
response is created, and then the end user installs the update
containing that response. Between the time the threat emerges, and a
response is installed may take days or more, all that time the machine
is virtually naked. Both forms of software are needed in the end.
Both these forms of software are available in free and purchasable
forms. The free forms seem to be less capable as a rule of thumb, and
the sort that one has to buy costs a lot of dollars.
The other cost is in time and inconvenience. Both forms of software will
need time to examine any process a particular computer is starting, or
any file being opened. Some software is very fast, some not. It's a suck
it and see proposition. The inconvenience of being asked every time one
wants to send or receive emails, open web pages or download just about
anything wears pretty thin in my experience.
The cost of insisting on the familiar is to not ever be really safe.
Even the best anti- virus, worm, trojan, software can be worked around.
If really big enterprises are vulnerable with their huge I.T. budgets,
how can a lowly home P.C. hope to be?
Now present the alternative. Your wife can have an operating system that
is inherently much safer than Windows can ever hope to be. The price is
nil dollars, and a one time learning experience discovering that
everything will work almost the same as before, and finding files is a
snap. The only big difference that your wife will experience is program
names. (My mum got the hang of it, and she's in her late seventies.)
It's true that Linux in any flavour is not watertight. But it's
inherently paranoid nature, and relative obscurity make it very unlikely
to be the target of a serious or successful security threat for the
foreseeable future.
Help your wife to understand that going through the inconvenience of
learning how to work Linux, without getting all technical, is the best
long term solution for her security issues that you can find.
Clay.
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