I am having what appears to be a spyware outbreak in one of our offices.
This office has 10 Dell PC's, some of which are used to access a medical
billing application on a remote server. I got a call a few days ago from
this office, complaining that the internet was so slow that it was
difficult to do data entry.
First I called the Internet service provider, the local cable company, and
they accessed our modem and told me that the internet going into this
office was at full speed, but that it could be that one or more of the
computers there was flooding the line with traffic. So I went to that
location, and after disconnecting one PC at a time I found that 2 of the
PCs were most likely infected with something that was causing the problem.
Both of these computers have Norton Internet Security 2008 installed. I
updated the virus defs and ran full scans on both units. They both came
back clean - no viruses or spyware found.
After this was done, I did more testing and found that one of these 2
units no longer seemed to cause any slowdown when connected, but the other
one still did. So I replaced the "infected" PC with another PC that I had
just reformatted and reinstalled Windows XP on. At this point all was well
- there were no complaints about internet slowdown for the rest of the
day. All this occurred yesterday.
This morning, however, I got a call from this office that the problem has
come back - the internet speed has slowed down and they are again having
trouble doing the data entry. So my question is this: As all the computers
are "protected" by Norton Internet Security, is this product not really up
to the task of keeping this suspected spyware out? If so, should I replace
NIS with something else, such as End-point Protection? Or is there another
strategy I need to be pursuing to solve this problem?
Thank you.
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