I work for an IT Consulting Firm and over 80% of our calls are on PC's that are heavily infected with spyware yet if these people would practice safer web surfing i.e. no P2P programs, quit opening SPAM, downloading so called free games, utilites, etc, and keep their PC's fully updated even on an XP box turn on the "auto updates", turn on auto updates on their anti-virus set it to auto scan once a week, and use a good firewall (windows xp's sp2 made the one with it even better for those running xp) and use free tools like Ad-Aware SE and Spybot Search and Destroy (go to download.com; they are free)it would prevent a large majority of these problems. It all boils down to end user education; Yes Microsoft is to blame too for the DSO Exploit in IE but hey, there will allways be some one to blame but atleast they added the popup blocker with Service Pack 2 on the XP Operating System. If they are running Windows 2000 / 98SE / etc use the yahoo or google toolbar which has a free pop up blocker. Just a few tips!

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/9837/28934#28934