I want to know how many members of this forum encountered infection in 2014. So the question is: did you personally (not your family, friends...) get infected in 2014. If yes, how did you infect your system? Infecting for testing purposes and fun does not count here - only real unintended infections. Please share your experience.
Some six or eight months ago I was searching for something on Google (don't recall what it was) clicked on one of the search results and was hit with some sort of variant of Cryptolocker. Got the screen that my files had been encrypted and I had to pay something like 300 or 500 bucks to get them back. Checked DefenseWall's logs, numerous things were prevented. Checked various files nothing I could tell were encrypted. Rebooted to let Shadow Defender do its job and all has been fine sense. So I answered the poll with "No" I was not infected.
No I haven't managed to get myself a malware attack yet. But I'm sure nobody would believe my statement without any proof. I'll get a scanner or two to validate my statement when I have the time for it. EDIT: Oh hey, sorry. I missed the adware part. For that category, I infect myself with those quite a few times, at least more than just twice.
Yea, I got hit with the FBI Block Virus/ Malware/ Ransomware Scam. Simply killed (sandboxed) browser process, and all was as before.
How do you guys manage to encounter malware? I enabled all javascript requests on dodgy websites and nothing happened. News sites gave no difference either.
This stuff shows up in my disposable Yahoo mailbox on a regular basis. All it takes is to have your e-mail addy publicly listed somewhere. They'll find it.
Nothing here as well. Had something back in the windows 98 days which came about from using MSN chat. Had to install Norton back then to get rid of it. In windows XP days some idiots were sending me the Netsky virus attachments in Yahoo email, probably from some "friends" that I had added from Yahoo chat. Since using Sandboxie, nary a problem. I voted no in the poll for 2014.
I contracted a couple of PUP's when I updated KMPlayer on my old Belnea laptop this year. It ran Vista HP x86 (before being later converted to Ubuntu 14.04). Luckily Avast! was on the ball and removed them during installation of the upgrade! The first and only time a dedicated AV program has ever detected and removed malware on a computer that I own. I uninstalled KMP and went back to SMPlayer.
2014 was like every other year as far as infections go. System is almost exactly the same as last year, and the year before... Nothing ever happens. It's a good thing I don't count on it for entertainment.
I got infected by running an infected download. My memory is terrible, but I believe I only got infected once this year, which is better than usual. Maybe one day my systems will remain completely malware free, but in the meanwhile I won't lose any sleep over it.
From a visible standpoint, none that I know of. At least, that is what I would like to believe seeing there are plenty of other low hanging fruits - the odds should be in my favor. Given how stealthy malware/exploit can be though, I wouldn't know for sure.
