A number of people report the years 2003-04 as being their first encounter with malware. Not a coincidence.
In over 15 years I have never been hacked. My normal anti virus applications are approximately as my sig indicates. Jerry
I have been compromised, it was in the years 2002-03. VBS_Redlof, missed entirely by Norton, caught by PC-cillin. PC-cillin missed something much more sinister: The Briss Keylogger; which was caught and cleanly and properly removed by McAfee, something no other AV I tried did at the time. That's when I developed some respect for McAfee - they had the best malware cleaning at that time (in my experience). In 2004 there were some minor backdoors that eScan caught (it then used Kaspersky's engine). There were times I almost got infected in later years; mostly I think 2006-07 (the ANI exploit was a close shave). As far as close shaves are concerned I have one regularly as I deal a lot with infected files these days.
Nothing but Mcafree Internet Security on a 98SE box using AOL through dial up. I knew absolutely nothing about security other than that whenever I saw a prompt about a virus I was to quarantine the thing then delete it later. Maybe a couple antispyware apps too like AOL Antispyware & Microsoft Antispyware (before Windows Defender... with the bullseye symbol). It only took like a half hour to reformat my box so I did it like every few days... lol. Once I got high speed and a router, learned how to set it up, and started using real AV's like Avira (very good/light product back in the day)... that was pretty much the end of the line.
