I have Norton AntiVirus, Webroot SpySweeper, and MS AntiSpyware, all of which are kept updated. I haven’t caught any viruses yet (knock on wood). When one of these programs alerts me to malware, it is almost always on a porn site. I don’t normally visit song lyrics sites, but I do remember getting an alert on one of those sites a while ago. It’s my understanding that illegal file swapping is a huge source of viruses and spyware, although I wouldn’t know anything about that personally.
I run Firefox. If I go anywhere that either/or:
- gets me a “Firefox prevented this page displaying a popup” message.
- banners for downloadable smileys and/or ringtones
…I’ll run anti-vurus.spyware software immediately and usually catch something.
Usually this is when my son goes to java game sites.
BTW, what’s whith atwola.com? Or is it artwola? It’s part of CNN. Go to CNN and this thing is always called. I went to it directly one day, and got a white screen with, in small type at the top, “Nothing to see here.” That scares me.
Our friend’s kid managed to screw up their computer by downloading “free” games - flash or java poker and other card games, that sort of thing. They sure came with plenty of vicious spyware at no extra charge (beware of Zango, that thing is nasty). My teenage sisters-in-law can turn a clean computer into a non-functioning, spyware laden mess in under a week. I have no idea how they achieve this. However, noticing a pattern, I venture the theory that the Number 1 cause of massive spyware invasion is kids.
I’m not entirely sure, and since I generally don’t get too much on my comptuer I don’t worry about it much. I occasionally visit flash sites or, rarely, lyrics sites, so I probalby get a bit from those. And I did once get a virus opening an e-mail attachment (and I really should’ve known better with that one). I don’t surf porn, so none there. s
On the other hand, this summer I found myself with two nasty pieces of mal-ware almost simultaneously, and I have no idea where they came from. One was adware, which I eventually got rid of using MS anti-spyware. Say what you will about Microsoft, neither Ad-aware nor SpyBot caught this thing, and MS did. The other one was the Mybot rootkit virus (which practically crippled my computer), which I managed to disable, though not remove (Computer in question has since been reformatted, and is no longer my problem anyways).
In my experience, people are incredibly lazy when it comes to keeping their computers safe. They just want to use the computer and won’t spend one second on anything related to basic maintenance.
For example:
- Running under an Admin account, because there is too much crappy software out there that doesn’t work right unless it has administrator access.
- Clicking OK on every message that pops up, with even reading it. This includes messages from anti-virus software telling them they have a virus. They just click OK and keep going.
- Opening every attachment that is sent to them.
- Installing ‘Free’ software that also installs spyware. They also use these programs to download other software and install it, even though they have no idea what it is or where it is coming from.
- Not bothering to install Windows updates. Usually the ‘updates are ready to install’ icon sits in the tray forever.
Updated antivirus, while essential, is only of limited help. Standard operating procedure for viruses these days is to flood the Internet with e-mails, carefully designed to get people to click on their attachment. The e-mails are everywhere before the antivirus vendors can find them and provide updated files.
For example, on our campus, we update our antivirus at the e-mail gateway every two hours. Still, when there’s a virus outbreak, we get flooded. It might take 8-12 hours for protection to be available: it has to be reported to the antivirus vendors (most mass mailing viruses these days try to avoid sending to addresses in antivirus domains, thus slowing the time it takes to notice it), the vendors have to analyze the nature of the virus, then write new definitions, then get them to their clients. For the home user, two-day old antivirus is often not good enough.
You’d probably be safer with a firewall and no antivirus, than with a firewall, full antivirus, and a propensity for clicking on attachments.