Let me say this don’t be as stupid as this guy was. If you are doing research on viruses and spyware put together a bare-bones test machine and isolate it on the network.
I do a great deal of beta testing and I have 2 guinea pig machines that I do all software testing on. I also build a nightly ghost image of the hard-drives and have the master image sitting on a shelf. Needless to say the master image has no dust on it as it gets used a lot. I also have installed a variety of tools to sniff my network stream and I manage what is going on with my registry and all of the files on the master drive are finger printed and I know when they have been messed with. But apparently this guy over at Ziff Davis used his personally work machine instead of a test lab machine and lost the battle. [ZDNet]