Windows 7: Have you ever been infected?

Yes.

During the years of IE6 we used Norton. It was regularly finding viruses/malware until we switched to Firefox. We switched to AVG. It found at least one threat my dad had downloaded. We tried ESET and I downloaded a program that 1000s had downloaded and a few said it was clean. It seemed to mess with Windows settings.

Now we use Norton + Sandboxie.



If my brother hadn't recommended Norton 2009, we would probably still be using ESET.

We also tried Avast! 5 Free recently after a re-install but we quickly went back to Norton. (Though, there were no problems with Avast!)

I was infected once with scareware. I went away on a business trip, and came back to pop ups all over my comp telling me I was infected with blah blah blah and needed to buy this antivirus to make it go away. One trip with MalwareBytes later, and it was gone.

So was my roommate.

I was infected many times as I liked infecting my own PC by running unknown and zero-day viruses and then scan the PC with diff AV. But that was my passion. Unknowingly, I have NEVER been infected.

Never infected on any machine that I am in control over, not once, using nothing but IE since 4.0 and virtually never any active AV running (though periodic check-ups and such to verify machine state were done throughout the years). I would occasionally install something like norton but then when the AV enevitably slows your machine to a crawl worse than any virus I quickly got rid of it. (Whitness McAffe's latest gaff. They "infected" more PCs an any single virus ever)

Security is MOSTLY about the mentality of the user. A secure mind is a secure machine.

Course I am also a software engineer so all this fancy computer mumbo jumbo is what I live, eat and breath every day. I wouldn't expect my parents, say, so ever reach my level of security consciousness...

After all that though, I have installed MSE on my systems and so far it has not make me want to kill it.

When I first started using a computer (first custom built 98se), I had adware galore! This led to my education about malware.

Oh, and I had Norton/Symantec .... got rid of that program and have never trusted it since.

Nope. I use protection.

I was infected once, when I had no AV at all, and pirated some software. I deserved it.

Haha that was my 800th post. What a way to make a fool of myself. I was talking purely software.

Thanks