A few xp tips

A few xp tips

here are some tips to help secure and keep xp running smoothly, they will mostly work with other versions of windows too. they are all free, or have free versions.

it’s probably best to make some kind of backup first incase something goes wrong. if you don’t have imaging software you can make a restore point and backup your registry. to backup your registry you can use ERUNT

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

ERUNT comes with NTREGOPT which you can read about, but from memory i think it compacts the registry. when you run ERUNT it saves backups to c:\Windows\ERDNT backups are big and one version makes backups ever time you reboot and only starts removing them when you have 30 backups saved, so just remember that.

ok, so a few useful tools for system hardening are -
xp-antispy

http://xp-antispy.org/index.php?lang=en

download it and run it, all it does is disable un-needed features as well as help tighten security. the defaults should be safe to use, it has a restore feature too so you can undo the changes.

xp-antispy will also hack the tcp/ip stack and allow more concurrent connections at a time, something needed for gathering proxies. see this post for how to do it -

http://forums.security-forum.net/318294-post10.html

if you use vista you can follow this -

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/0…event-id-4226/

Cyberhawk
Cyberhawk is a behavior analyzer which runs from the kernel which means it can detect a lot of malware and the malware shouldn’t be able to do much about defeating it. most of it’s competitors are pretty complicated and need a good understanding for system processes, but Cyberhawk is very easy to use, just set it up and forget about it.

http://www.novatix.com/Cyberhawk/

BOClean
BOClean was one of the first anti-trojans around and was one of the best paid anti-trojans for a lonf time. but, it recently changed ownership and became free, i don’t know much about the new owners, but it should be worth using, either for one off scans or in real-time.

http://www.nsclean.com/boclean.html

superantispyware
this is a very good antispyware. if you already have one you can still get this and do the occasional scan with it. it has a very good heuristic scan engine, heuristics can pick up malware without a signature, or pattern, but can give false positives so check anything it finds to make sure it’s really bad

http://www.superantispyware.com/

AxCrypt
AxCrypt is an easy to use File Encryption Software. meaning you can hide pictures and videos in a folder, right-click on it and select encrypt with AxCrypt all you have to do is remember the password. it uses an open source licence which for this kind of software is very important; it means there are no hidden backdoors for anyone to use, also crypto experts will have looked through the code and found any weaknesses and improved it.

http://www.axantum.com/AxCrypt/

there’s also truecrypt, but it’s fairly complicated to use but is probably better for larger folders.

Eraser
with this program you can right-click on a file and shred it. meaning the file will be over-written with random data. when you delete a file from your computer the file is still on your hard drive because the computer only deletes the pointer to the file so it can’t remember where it was. in time the file might be over-written with new data. but eraser makes it so the file is unrecoverable.
get the older version – Eraser 5.7, people have had problems with the newer version.

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/download.php

CCleaner
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. you can tell it to run scans at boot, or everytime the computer shutsdown. if you run the registry cleaner it’s important to use the option to make backups incase it breaks something, that’s just with the registry cleaner part though, i think that can only be run manually.
http://www.ccleaner.com/