Windows 7, not enough.

I've not encountered a virus on a machine I personally owned since xp, so I think all of this is nonsense personally.
That's just me though I use something called commonsense and a handy browser plugin called noscript.
Which is a pain to set up right for your favorite sites, but I did that ages ago and the settings migrate to new installations, or even other computers in the house without problem.

I can't understand how people get viruses so readily, it's always amazed me.

As for hacking, I don't know why every tom, dick, and harry seems to believe that the most skillful hacker in the world has targeted their personal computer.
The entire concept is laughable to me.

Maguscreed said:

I've not encountered a virus on a machine I personally owned since xp, so I think all of this is nonsense personally.

I've not had a single virus problem on one of my own PC's for over 8 years. I attribute most of this to the time when I gave up on peer to peer software, stopped downloading music, stopped pirating software of any kind and quit look looking for serial numbers and password generators.

However, I have had to clean many a PC from friends, family and coworkers who just got hit with a drive by download of a "fake AV" application. In fact, i just did one last week for a friend who was searching google for "empty wine barrels" for a craft project she was considering. Another friend at work, got hit with a "fake AV" searching for sunglasses online.

Maguscreed said:

That's just me though I use something called commonsense and a handy browser plugin called noscript.

Well, in my above examples, I don't think a lack of common sense would have prevented the search for "empty wine barrels" or "sun glasses" from happening.

I will say that in both cases, the users were using Internet Explorer to surf the web. Both of them have AV products installed (she had AVG and he had Trend Micro), and both are savvy enough to have malware bytes installed on their computers. She didn't really know that using IE could be considered by some to be a security risk...and he uses IE because we have a few in house corporate websites which unfortunately only work with IE...so he doesn't usually flip flop back and forth between other browsers all day long..he just uses the one that he has to use for other things.

Personally, I haven't used IE for years. I used to use Firefox for years and years and years. I use spyware blaster on my machines....although not sure if it has really prevented anything, or if I have simply been lucky and not hit anything. I use sandboxie when doing any type of web surfing that might be questionable (like when work bought an iPAD and that wanted me to research how to jailbreak the thing because they needed Flash support).

Maguscreed said:

I can't understand how people get viruses so readily, it's always amazed me.

Neither can I, but I have worked on 4 different machines just this year alone that were all torqued up mostly due to drive by downloads and fake AV malware apps. It certainly does happen. And not everybody is searching porn and clicking on warez links either.

Maguscreed said:

As for hacking, I don't know why every tom, dick, and harry seems to believe that the most skillful hacker in the world has targeted their personal computer.
The entire concept is laughable to me.

Well, a drive by fake AV isn't exactly hacking...but once it gets on your computer, it starts asking for money and wants you to buy software to fix these "so called problems" that it discovers. That's not really laughable and makes total sense.

Once those things get on your machine, your machine is almost unusable. Cannot open a command prompt, cannot open the control panel, cannot get into task manager, cannot start malware bytes, cannot get into msconfig. Pretty much cannot get rid of the thing.

These things often take "me" 2-3 hours to identify and figure out how to shut down. Most are engrained enough that safe mode usually doesn't fix it. Typically, it's a matter of finding whatever .exe is running (which is hard when task manager and process manager won't start) and then either deleting it (usually cannot when it's in use) or renaming it (works more often than not).

So, the money grab makes total sense. If the average person is willing to pay $30, or $50 or $75 for the software to make their newly discovered computer issues go away...some might actually pay to get their computer back.

What I think they really need to do is make noscript available for all browsers, and issue it with a set of allowances for commonly visited sites so people that don't know what to allow and what not to allow can use it.
It's the greatest thing I can intentionally navigate to a website I know is loaded with driveby viruses and all I get is a message telling all the nasty stuff noscript is blocking for me. Antivirus never even comes into play.

As I said above though, setting it up initially and using it takes a bit of know how.
It also never hurts to use the spyboy search and destroy immunization.
It does keep the browser from being redirected to thousands of known injection sites and addresses and has no effect at all on normal surfing or performance.
I've actually installed spybot and used the feature then uninstalled spybot (because I like mbam better for scanning) and it leaves the settings in the browser when removed.

It's a step that may be a good idea for those couple of friends of yours that keep hitting bad sites.

Websites also need to be designed properly!

There is an excessive amount of useless JS and Flash on most websites now.
When a site needs 100+ scripts running (just so you can attach a file to an email) there is something wrong.
Yahoo mail requires you to activate Flash, before you can attach anything to an email!

The ridiculous number of garbage routines make it easy for bad guys to hide their own malicious ones on the page.