Racer said:
Agree completely.. I used to have to run Adaware, Spybot every day and had extreme difficulty clearing cache when using IE, now I rarely get these problems!
I downloaded a massive HOSTS file which seems to do an excellent job of stopping many trackers and dodgy websites/ads/popups from loading (
http://accs-net.com/hosts/what_is_hosts.html for more info or Google). However, one still has to be careful with ActiveX pages.
Last month I ran Ad-aware, Spybot and Antispyware to clear out my machine completely - actually, there wasn't too much on it anyway.
Then, the following week I only used Opera for all my internet browsing. A scan for "nasties" the following Saturday revealed only 6 tracking cookies which is not really so serious.
The next week I only used IE 6 and again, scanned on the following Saturday and only 7 tracking cookies were found.
My surfing for both weeks saw me visiting the same websites I normally do, like Hotmail, T2W, Dpreview etc. with the occasional new Google search. Conclusion? Cookies can get still get through with high security levels but they are not of the particularly malicious variety.
I should say at this point that I only use the IE firewall which is not so hot, and all other security updates installed including SP1, but not 2, as it caused problems with my hardware.
It'd be interesting to run a similar comparison with Firefox, although I do'nt think there would be many differences as my HOSTS file is doing such a stirling job. As long as I continue to be careful with ActiveX webpages and don't run any new *.exe that may have downloaded themselves onto my machine, I can control spyware effectively enough.
