An open letter to PC World

Dear PC World,

Having recently being invaded by some spyware, I was very intrigued by the PC World issue of August 2006 where in bold letters on the front page I read: “10 biggest security risks you don’t know about - how to protect your PC and your privacy”.

While I am grateful for the 10 items listed, in terms of doing anything useful about them your article is pure fluff. I suppose your magazine is just an excuse for the 100+ pages of advertisements plus all the plugs to buy all sorts of additional software.

Yes, my laptop was infected with the ad-ware spyware. Yes, in my zeal to root it out I did destroy my Windows XP registry by deleting most of the entries with HKLM in it before I realized it stood also for Hardware Key Local Machine and was needed by Windows.

How did I get over my problem? Not by buying antispyware or antivirus software that would unnecessarily slow down my machine, scanning for yesterday’s bugs. I did it by having a safe, valid and complete image of my hard drive on a USB hard-drive.

Acronis, Apricorn and Norton Ghost for instance can create such mirror images of hard-drives thereby making recovery easy, fast and painless. The non-system related and more volatile data I incrementally back up regularly.

You mentioned the Trojan Winloginhook.Delf.A in your article yet you don’t tell where it would locate itself. Here on the other hand is my location list for the ad-ware malware:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\bridge.dll
C:\WINDOWS\btgrab.dll
C:\WINDOWS\dlmax.dll
C:\WINDOWS\susp.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\alxres.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\bridge.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\questmod.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\runsrv32.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\tcpservice2.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\txfdb32.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\udpmod.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wstart.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\adobepnl.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\runsrv32.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\srv32.exe
C:\WINDOWS\alxtb1.dll
C:\WINDOWS\susp.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wstart.dll

I would hope that your articles provide more useful, substantive information in the future. Until then your readers are alarmed by your articles but on their own.

Sincerely,