Its amazing: I’m spending up to 90% of my time fixing computers with Malware/spyware infections.

Whats even more amazing is that I’m seeing more & more systems becoming infected despite running anti-malware software. Ive seen a system recently that had ad-aware, spyware doctor, spybot S&D… but ewido (http://www.ewido.net/en/) still found over 450 infected objects (about 350 were just cookies, but that still ads up to 100 objects, or about 6 different “nasty” malware applications…

Is it just me, or are malware infections on the rise?

Although ewido is currently my primary malware detector, it did give me a false-positive about 1 week ago (causing me to waste a lot of time chasing a “ghost” malware app.). Your milage may vary.

My own systems seem ok, but then I’m behind a NAT router, running outpost firewall (http://www.agnitum.com/) on my main system, and also running antivir (http://www.free-av.com/) and winpatrol (http://www.winpatrol.com) and I also update windows XP every month or two. Oddly, I don’t run any background malware scanner. I occasionally run ad-aware (http://www.lavasoft.com/) and ewido, but they only find the occasional bad cookie.

I guess part of the solution is that I use an unconvetional email clients:
the bat! (http://www.ritlabs.com/) and foxmail, so I’m not so vunrable to many email malware.

I also use a relativley little known browser called Maxthon, which does an excellent job at blocking popups & bad sites.

In fact, I have a laptop on my network, which doesn’t have a firewall, (the windows xp firewall is disabled), it doesn’t have any anti virus & anti-malware software… just winpatrol (and it never finds anything wrong), and the occasional windows update.

Maybe I’m just lucky, & maybe I’m just familiar with the processes running within task manager…