No infections whatsoever in 2014. Not even malware detection whilst browsing, on the other hand my AV detected a lot of nasty stuff from third party USB flash drives. System checked sporadically by MBAM, MBAR, HitmanPro, and HerdProtect.
I have never been infected, nor has my wife or kids. I think it is just the easily conned people that suffer from that problem clicking on silly stuff. In fact, I have recently decided to not use an anti-virus anymore. Just a waste of resources for me. Microsoft has its Operating Systems very well covered, except for the foolish. Only the foolish fall for silly crap.
Here, here... have your chocolate bar. I also scanned with HPT (HerdProtect) but all it found were only FPs, it flagged one of Cyberfox's file and some emulator plugins.
I don't know. I have one email address intended as a spam central and I never get other than your average pushy advertisements. Well in fact, even at that I've never encountered any viagra ads. What? NO! I don't want any of those. What are you guys talking about?! I did encounter some suspicious activities, but never got blatant malware attack, especially without user intervention in the initialization, like LoneWolf and Bob D had encountered.
The Yahoo e-mail address has been in use for about 10 years. When I was beta testing SSM, it was one of my best sources of material. They've had plenty of time to find it. Mine gets at least one malicious e-mail every week and more scams than I can count. Some of them are quite entertaining. Nothing I've seen so far looks like a targeted attack.
Never in the last 15 years, but finally last week a virus named "Microsoft Update" screw up my computer all right. Thanks to Macrium Reflect it's back to life again.
Been at least 18 years since I was infected. That was merely adware from a prepacked installer. 95% of malware infections are self inflicted.
Seems like I managed to get my laptop compromised yesterday. I noticed at a certain point that the browser (Midori) was being sloooooowwww - cursor lag when mousing over the window, very slow rendering. Looked at ~/.xsession-errors, and noticed a bunch of attempts to start a Java applet - all failed, thanks to the preloaded noexec library, but still. And on closing the browser, it tried to spawn instances of ps and grep. Looking for some process to migrate to, maybe. This was with the JS blocker plugin too. Wish I'd figured out what website. Ah well, it was time to rotate my passwords anyway. Meanwhile I've made the switch to Ubuntu 14.04, with light AppArmor profiles enabled for various things. I don't think that's quite sufficient though. Will post some ideas on this elsewhere. For now, suffice to say a) Linux may not be all that vulnerable, but it is not invulnerable b) Javascript whitelisting is good, but it is not a panacea Edit: oh yeah: c) The compromise of a program's memory space may not be obvious. Lucky I thought to look at my X session logs, otherwise I would not have noticed anything amiss.
'Microsoft Update' is almost impossible not to contract on Windows. Which is why I recently bought a laptop preinstalled with Ubuntu. It may not be bullet proof but at least it will never suffer from the dreaded 'Microsoft Update'. lol
Ubuntu and other distros also require updates. As long as it's called "updates", things can go smoothly...or things can go wrong. If OS updates are a huge pain, you can always adopt a " wait & see" approach. Let others be the early adopters (there would always be machines on Auto updates). If problems are found and it affects a substantial amount of users, there would be reports and get noticed. The updates are then held back and reissued once fixed.
The difference is that the past four months have seen substantially problematical updates released from Microsoft. The only inference from this that I can deduce is that there has been an overall lack of quality control and testing in the issuing of these recent updates. The reason for this is so far undetermined.
Collected a drive-by early in the year – (got well and truly caught with my pants down around my ankles!) ONE click was all it took! Knew nothing about it until a month later. I had been farting around with a program called Groovedown (a dodgy program if there ever was one) I couldn't get it to work, so ended up letting my frustrations get the better of me. I disabled Comodo – then Sandboxie, Noscript, etc, with the only result being that Groovedown changed my Firefox Home page\Search engine (from Startpage.com to U-Search.net) In the course of trying to reset my Home page – I ran a search of the net looking for a Startpage.com link - and clicked on one of the 'Startpage' links (I should have looked at it more carefully!) and then realized the web site was not what I was after. (I subsequently discovered that Startpage was a malicious web site that downloads the trojan just by visiting the site. (nothing to do with Startpage.com!) I didn't think any more of this until a month later when I ran a manual scan using MBAM and it detected 2 instances of a trojan called Trojan.Startpage and 1 of Hijack.Startpage in the Registry. These were easily removed. (in case you're wondering, I don't run an AV) In this 'infection', I was lucky, as StartPage is only a low level trojan that changes a browser’s home page and tries redirecting your search results, etc. Once I had re-enabled my security (after visiting the web site) – the trojan was effectively bound, gagged and neutered until removed by MBAM. The moral of this story? - if you play with fire, expect to get burnt! A curious aspect of this episode was that my daily scheduled scan using HMP failed to pick up the trojan remnants. (maybe HMP thought it was beneath it's dignity to classify these remnants as malicious?)
Not only did I not get infected in 2014, I have never been infected in 33 years of using personal computers and over 20 years of Windows. I've never run resident A/V software, and I even used IE through 2007 or so.
Nothing but a couple of strange eicar items that were in the temp files which were sandboxed anyway. Regards Eck
Must be 6 years or so since I had an virus\malware infection...Seems that the only thing any AV I use does is warn me with some legit\false positive or self-serving (warez sites) when browsing.