While you are at home for the holidays many in our profession will be called upon to answer any number of profane technical questions. Once per annum, I do my best to clean up the aging PC my parents use for Ebay, shopping, and word processing. I’ve been insistent in the past that software should only be installed if it came from an angel descended from heaven. All else requires a requisition and approval process. Even so, as certain as death and taxes Malwarebytes chews through the hard disk and spits out a decent amount of malware detections. It’s almost a certainty that the browser was the infection vector for all of these. After backing up files and restoring to a premade image, I had to sit down and explore my options.
In my quest to make the browser safer, I came up with two options. One is simple and devious. The other is more complex, systematic, and sublime.
Option 1:
Step 1. Change the browser icon for Chrome to the IE icon.
The path is “C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe”
Step 2. Within Chrome, install Adblock Plus and HTTPS Everywhere.
Option 2:
Step 1. Install Privoxy.
Step 2. Open the Internet Options dialog.
Step 2. Choose LAN settings and change the proxy address to localhost and the port to 8118.
Feel free to check “Bypass proxy server for local addresses.”
Both of these options should prevent the browser from interacting with unnecessary advertising and more questionable content that could lead to infection.