ThreeD
join:2001-05-19
Southern Cal
clubs:
| Scanning external drives for spyware - Important??
When doing a virus scan it is common to scan every drive.
When doing an adware / spyware scan - How important is it to scan all drives and not just the system drive??
The reason I ask is I just found out that the anti-spyware program I am using is unable to scan external drives as part of the scheduled scans. I regularly use external USB drives and now I find out that the nightly scan I do cannot include the external drives.
Is this really important or am I just being overly cautious? Does most spyware "live" on the system partition or can it exist on other partitions and drives?
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My goal in life is to be as good of a person as my dog already thinks I am. |
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ThreeD
join:2001-05-19
Southern Cal
clubs: | Any idea on where else I could ask this question? |
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PetePuma
How many lumps do you want
Premium,MVM
join:2002-06-13
Arlington, VA
| reply to ThreeD
Re: Scanning external drives for spyware - Importa
Posts made late(r) at night sometimes get buried before too many people can see them.
It's probably a moderate risk. If the spyware installer gets kicked off, it could conceivably write stuff anywhere. That being said, I haven't heard of any behaving that way. Plus, most spyware must also do some registry hacks as well as placing the binaries, so odds are you'd get some indication that you have a baddie and could then take steps from there. |
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marti
Color outside the lines
Premium,MVM
join:2001-12-14
Houston, TX
clubs:
| reply to ThreeD
If you have the time, no harm is done in scanning all partitions and external drives. If your anti-spyware program can't scan "everything" perhaps you should find another program that will perform your required scanning tasks.
You are not being over-cautious; paranoia about malware is not a bad thing, but programs that stop the malware before it can reach your computer is the ideal situation. |
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ThreeD
join:2001-05-19
Southern Cal
clubs:
| reply to PetePuma
Thanks for the information. That is basically what I thought would be the situation but wanted to confirm it. If spyware has to interact with the OS, then it needs to at least leave some tracks on the main partition. I still don't like the idea though that there could be pieces elsewhere which could reinfect the system. Maybe I do need to start looking around for some new anti-spyware but the one I am using now is top rated and it was a bit of a shock to find out that it had this weakness.
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My goal in life is to be as good of a person as my dog already thinks I am. |
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