by Gary R » June 11th, 2013, 12:14 pm
Usually Hotmail accounts get hacked at the site end rather than your end, so if your password gets compromised, then the "fix" is usually to change your password. if it gets hacked again, then delete/close your existing account and create a new one.
Conduit is just one variant of the "bandoo media" toolbars, there's a whole mass of them, and parts of several different ones are usually found when cleaning them off someone's machine. What they came with I couldn't say, they get bundled with all sorts of things, and keeping up with which ones they're currently attached to is a pointless and unending job, so we generally don't try. We just remove them when we find them.
IOBit's programs are not malicious as such, but they do steal other people's work, so their morals are questionable at best, and I do not recommend their programs. In any case, most "Tune Up" utilities do more harm than they do good. Windows Registry is remarkably tolerant of orphans, and you can remove thousands of them without any noticeable improvement in performance. However, remove just one necessary Registry entry, and you can easily create an unbootable machine. The gain vs risk equation is not a good one, so I do not recommend any of these type of programs.
As for torrent programs, IMO there are no safe P2P programs. Not because the individual programs are malicious, but because the methods they use, and the sources of the files they "share" are uncheckable, and therefore easily open to abuse by unscrupulous individuals (and there's an awful lot of them about).
The biggest single thing you can do, to reduce your chance of picking up another infection, is to stop using P2P. I don't think I can say things any clearer than that.