How have you been infected in the past?

[RJK3]

I was curious how people have been infected in the past, although I'm sure not everyone wants to admit it if it's happened The poll itself is anonymous.

Fair's fair, so I'll start off:

1. When I was about ten a floppy disk from a friend infected our computer with a boot sector virus, which made the computer unbootable. Looking back, it was fun having to learn how to repair the boot sector and disinfect the virus - just like a puzzle in an adventure game. It taught me to always scan floppy disks, and later USB sticks.

2. In the late 90s, a male friend of my older sister tricked her into running Back Orifice (if anyone remembers that backdoor remote admin program!). Dirty voyeur. Somehow I figured it out and disabled it, then tracked the access attempts to his IP address. His mum was mortified when she was told!

3. Early 2000s, a few of the freeware programs from well known publishers came with hidden spyware - ergo why most of us started using Spybot: S&D. This is what I mean by spyware in the poll; I'm sure many remember Aureate and Alexa.

4. I admit at some stage to stupidly running a file that contained a trojan when really I knew better; unfortunately curiosity as well as false negatives from AV scans overrode common sense in that case. Last time I did anything like that without first managing the risk intelligently, and it's been a long time since I've been infected.

I decided to go by the infectors themselves (virus, trojan, etc), rather than so much the vectors (email attachments, USB stick, etc) - otherwise it would be a long and disorganised poll. The vectors are inherent anyway, e.g. a trojan is always going to trick in one way or another; a worm is always going to propagate itself with certain methods, etc. I put application exploits as a category of their own as even though the payload is usually a trojan of some sort, the trojan executes without the user doing anything other than using an internet facing application or visiting a webpage that hosts an exploit kit.

[moontan]

to tell the truth, i haven't been infected for the past couple of years.

before that, my solution to infections was to reformat/reinstall.
i just credit my last couple of years to better self-education, probably more aggressive strategies form malware fighting companies.

and of course, being part of Wilders is a big bonus!

[Hungry Man]

I've gotten three infections in my lifetime.

Smitfraud
Vundo

and what I suspect was a rootkit.

It's been a long time though. All were the result of me being an idiot. Getting infected was what got me interested in computers.

[cozumel]

Trojan rootkit, driveby & possible worm infections I did deliberately to myself when running with zero protection to see how long it would take. (lost control of my system in around 40 minutes)

Spyware accidental but not few years.

Nothing else to my knowledge.

[ExtremeGamerBR]

As I remember, I took only one infection. It was a Trojan and was in 2007 while browsing on a social network. I used Avast! Free and it blocked infection completely.

[Dark Shadow]

Yes 1 trojan in 07 none since then.Trying to stay under the radar-stealth mode.

[Crinie]

Stealth B boot sector virus from a floppy back in '95, best thing that ever happened to me, I began learning how to read my hard drive from a Hexadecimal program, went in and manually erased it. Used Norton Antivirus for a while after that until Symantec bought them out, then switched to F-Prot.

[The Hammer]

I voted other. As I was done in by a SAS FP once. I learned a lesson that day. Does that count?

[Trooper]

Its been so long I cant recall. I guess if we have to count everything it would be conficker, at my job. Not my fault by the way.

[Crinie]

I've had plenty of trojans, seen sitting in task manager, delete them before rebooting or reboot with a CD and delete.

[TheKid7]

I picked up a Java Trojan around 5 to 6 years ago. My Antivirus at the time was McAfee Enterprise 8.0i. I switch from McAfee after that Trojan. Another Anti-Malware scanner detected/cleaned the Trojan. This happened a couple of years before I started using Sandboxie. I have been clean since I started using Sandboxie.

[Spysnake]

MS Blaster was my only real infection. Got it when installing Windows XP (no service packs at the time) without a hardware firewall, as XP did not have any robust firewall at the first boot. That way I began to always do my installs with the network cable unplugged - tradition I continue even today.

Maybe there were some adware infections in my early computing days too, but nothing too serious.

[Noob]

I was once infected with a trojan a few times before (Circa 2002 - 2004) when i knew nothing about security.
I think in those times the blame was on a few CD's i had which my bro bought (You know, pirated games )

As of now i've never been infected in the recent years, specially since joining Wilders. Though i remember in 2008 i once clicked yes on one of those fake AV's by mistake because i used to hate reading those pop ups and as soon as i saw that crap downloading i pushed the restart button on my desktop LOL and avoided the infection

[vasa1]

My friend has picked up "Security Sphere 2012". This nasty is one of those "pay us to clean up your highly infected PC". A good description is here:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/viru...ty-sphere-2012

He's coming over later. Let's see! I have no experience is cleaning up these things.

[PJC]

Early 2000's: Adware and some Trojans...

[vasa1]

Originally Posted by vasa1

My friend has picked up "Security Sphere 2012". This nasty is one of those "pay us to clean up your highly infected PC". A good description is here:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/viru...ty-sphere-2012

He's coming over later. Let's see! I have no experience is cleaning up these things.

Looks like he got off easily. We just followed the bleeping instructions!

[Bob D]

Sasser worm (MS's lsass vulnerability) many years ago.
Only infection I've experienced.

[SweX]

Voted other. I got infected in Circa 1999 with a homepage changer while I was using Panda Platinum (My first AV).
But have never been infected after that .

[LoneWolf]

Prior to joining Wilders and relying on only an AV, yes.
Now focusing on prevention instead of detection and cure.
Infection free now for almost 6 years.

[Osaban]

I'm a late comer to computers, I bought my first in 2001. In 2003-2004 my computer started to shut down and restart on its own, I honestly could never imagine some people could actually write code to disrupt other machines, I was still looking at the PC as a television set, a sophisticated piece of electronics, but still not as a machine that could execute damaging orders.

I used to invite friends over for dinner so that they could clean my computer, I really had no clue where to start. Then back in 2004 one of my friends found my machine infected with 30 various pieces of malware (mostly spyware, but trojans and viruses as well). That was my turning point, I thought enough is enough and I started learning about security suites, anti spyware websites, and found Wilders.... I've never been infected since, but I've also lost the thrill that I experienced when browsing freely with no security, and I don't mean security doesn't bring freedom, it is rather a state of mind, a sort of paranoia that affects my browsing mood.

[luciddream]

Before I started taking security seriously, and had only an inbound FW & Mcafee (outdated), I got infected regularly. It's been going on 6 years now since I've been infected, after discovering better AV products (Avira, Avast, Kaspersky), learning my way around an outbound FW, and using measures built into my OS (Local/Group Policy, SRP, folder permissions, services, ect...)

And now after adding HIPS & sandboxing, I just don't see it happening unless malware evolves to the point of rendering such measures moot. And with ShadowProtect, if something did slip by me, it wouldn't matter anyhow.

[RJK3]

Thanks for the feedback, very interesting to read people's experiences and thoughts!

I used to love reading the various descriptions of the various viruses listed in Norton or Dr Solomon, and even later on with Avira which I used for over a decade.

[Atomic_Ed]

The only time I ever got an infection of any kind on one of my personal systems was a few years back. I was running NIS 2009 and was infected by 2 different trojans (dns changers) and even though the system was bogged down to heck and the correct websites were not coming up, it never once gave any indication of the infection even after full scans. I knew something was up, loaded a competitive packae which found the trojans immediately.

[Rampastein]

The systems I've used have got infected twice, although at the time I wasn't old enough to control them. I didn't really know what infected them, but there were some non-legal versions of some software installed and things like Flash and Java weren't kept up-to-date (so I guess it was either trojans or exploits).

That's when I got interested about security, and after cleaning that computer from the nice amount of trojans and the rootkit it had I've always been running a proper firewall with a strong HIPS (and usually also an AV) and never been infected.

I found the second infection a few months after the first infection when I was trying different security setups and an AV found something right after it was installed.

I've got targeted by exploits when browsing about once in a year but usually the AVs have picked the malware, and when they haven't done so a HIPS/BB has prevented the infection.

[Daveski17]

I first became interested in security about three years ago when my Norton AV seemed to hang-up in scans looking for the dreaded Carny_Ride virus. This behaviour prompted a lot of discussion on Symantec's forums so I downloaded other programs just to be on the safe side. These included SUPERAntiSpyware, which was the first on-demand anti-malware scanner I ever downloaded, Spybot Search & Destroy & SpywareBlaster. The latter program probably introduced me to these forums.

Then, at about the same time, after contracting a *trojan from a Russian journal webpage (almost certainly through an infected flash ad) I started to think more about security. I was using SeaMonkey's (Google) translator & hadn't started to use NoScript yet, but a Google page informed me that I had been compromised. Norton & Spybot couldn't find anything but SAS found the trojan & removed it.

My security set-up on both of my computers is relatively simple, I use MSE on both (with SAS on the notebook) & browser-end security such as WOT, NoScript, ABP/adblocking filters, Certificate Patrol etc, all depending on which browser I am actually using at the time.

Well, that & some common sense.


*It's interesting that 39.47% (at the time of posting) have also claimed to have been infected by a trojan at some point.