[treyk1]

So I've been dealing with some elusive malware/trojan/virus issues. I run AVG, WinDefender&firewall always. I run Ad-Aware about weekly. I've noticed "something's not right" and downloaded MAB and found a couple of things...that all of the other's apparently have missed. Also set up ZoneAlarm and disabled WinFirewall.
So I'm still unsure and run online Trend HouseCall and it finds the above WMA.GetCodec.c in 5-6 mp3 files...and apparently cleans/quarantines them. I also run MS Malicious SoftRemTool.
SO...I'm STILL unsure and run Kaspersky and it finds the housecall quarantine, and a couple of others (Exploit.SWF.Agent.bn, Exploit.Win32.Pidief.bdy) in my temp folders. I looked these up and appears they are less than friendly adware/trojan downloader types.

Out of curiosity I select and scan each one individually with AVG, MalwareB, and Ad-aware and all say "no infection found"

What does it take to stay protected? All this time I felt comfortable with AVG, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, WinDefender, and Firewall.

And what about when one company states this file is malicious and another company states this isn't a problem?


Perplexed.


EDIT - No p2p on this machine but the infected mp3 files probably were at some point...a gift that keeps giving.

[TOGG]

I've never used AVG and I gave up on AdAware and Windows Defender some time ago because they didn't seem to do very much (and some things I've seen online suggested they weren't very good, but I have no 'proof' of that).

From what you posted it appears that your 'problems' are either in temp files or where Housecall stores its quarantined items. Clearing your temp files by using Windows Disk cleanup may be all you need to get rid of the things stored there, and I assume it must be possible to access Housecall's quarantine folder and delete the contents, but I don't know how because I have never used it. In any event, quarantined items should not be able to do any harm so I suppose they could be left where they are.

You could get a second opinion by running another online scan, the Eset Online scan for example, and see what it finds; http://www.eset.eu/eset-online-scanner If you do decide to try it, be sure to read all the instructions first.

It wouldn't be unusual for something obtained via P2P to be infected or for some 'security' programs to 'miss' things others don't. There is also the possibility that some programs are producing 'false positives', so that what they 'find' is not malicious at all.

[Rich-M]

Eset is amongst the best but for this issue I would use www.superantispyware.com or www.malwarebytes.com or both and both have free manual versions. Adaware, Spybot and the spyware prevention in Avg are really old technology and not of much use. Windows defender is a completely useless application as far as I can see and I would disable or uninstall it if I were you.

[Blackmirror]

Originally Posted by treyk1

What does it take to stay protected? .

common sense and this

[lunarlander]

Here an extra site to confuse you on whether a file is a virus or not :

http://www.virustotal.com/

It scans your uploaded file with 39 antivirus products and give you their results.