Secure Your Box against Spyware

So, I was thinking the other day.  There are so many piece of crap websites out there with spyware and malware, and so much of this spyware and malware is really just trying to lure you to install fake anti-spyware and bogus malware kits to further cripple your system (ie: keyloggers, datamines, various other trojans and banner/popup hijacks) and was looking for a good hosts file.

So, I looked around for a good hosts.txt file, and actually found one hosted on mvps.org

What’s a hosts.txt file for?

Hrm.  Idiotifying this is gonna be a toughy. So try to read this slowly and assume you haven’t taken any protective steps.

• Let’s pretend you have a website, such as google.com.  You type in google.com and all the sudden your browser goes there.
• Now let’s pretend you have a site imgonnascrewyourpc.com and you DONT wanna go there.  Well, if you click on a link that obscurely routes your browser to that “host”, your DNS is gonna resolve that name to an ip and go ahead and shove your computer on over there and voila- your computer probably is going to get hijacked.
• Now, what does this have to do with hosts?  Read on!

Hosts are sort of an advance guard.

Think of your hosts list as a little guy on a horse riding before the army with a banner. Your pc processes a hosts file before it bothers calling up the dns.  Ergo, if you want to defeat the ambush-links, you can simply instruct your little calvary man to look out for the evil hosts out there and go somewhere else instead.

How do I teach my knight in shining armor to work?

You simply instruct your hosts.txt to reroute and retreat from an offensive “host” by using a loopback.  A loopback basically tells your internet connection instead of going from point a to point b, to sit tight and don’t walk into the trap.

Loopback?  Stop using that fangled computer language!!!!

Don’t sweat it.  basically if you have a big list of bad sites, and you make all those bad sites never pop up before you ever think about clicking on anything, you’re less likely to fall prey to a haxploitation of your browser and pc.  Your hosts.txt file can defend you if you level it up, and that’s why I have linked to the hosts.txt file at mvps.org.

I’ve read over it, and installing it will protect your pc against over 16,000 bad nasty mean evil ambush hosts (sites) and various popup servers.

It might take a bit of effort to digest the instructions from that link, so feel free to comment back if it’s not clear.