Have you ever been infected?

[malexous]

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!)

 

[blackroseMD1]

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.

 

[Dinesh]

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.

 

[fseal]

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.

 

[Jacee]

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.

 

[Product FRED]

Nope. I use protection.

 

[Jonathan_King]

Nope. I use protection.

:shock:

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

 

[Product FRED]

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

:roflmao:

 

[Jonathan_King]

Here's your snip. Congratulations!


​

 

[Product FRED]

Thanks

 

[McSeven]

Once!

All antiviruses that I have used except Norton caught all problems. And I was able to use some other free tool to get rid of the culprit.

 

[bobtran]

Yup....Windows 98se and Norton. Then I go rid of Norton and have never been infected again. I am however grateful to Norton for falling down on the job because it caused me to become a lot more educated in malware and what it takes to protect one's self from the "your bullet, your gun, your foot" syndrome.

 

[TVeblen]

Are you kiddin'?!? I got KIDS!

I've got AVG on a couple computers, and Avast on 2. These do a good job catching most crap these kids run into on their stupid Japanese anime romance sites and this one game site that they would not stay away from. (They don't dare pull that stuff on this box!)

From time to time they get something that completely trashes the system. This is mostly because they leave everything open and running while they shuffle upstairs, in slow motion, to tell me: "Dad, the computer is having issues". That was Virtumonde. A nasty little bugger that one. Self replicating.

I regularly do a system image on those boxes. So I tell em "it's trashed. You f'd up. Turn it off, it's done!" Then I wait a day or 2, restore the image, and we are good to go. :devil:

I exaggerate. This happened a couple times a while back when their brains were still squishy and evolving. They are pretty good about everything now.

That reminds me... haven't imaged the basement box in over a month!

 

[whs]

Never when I used Norton, only when I used MSE - 3 times on 2 different machines. And I never visit shady sites without Sandboxie.

 

[Corrine]

Never! --> Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and I hope to keep it that way. I do realize, however, that search results could land me on a site serving up drive-by downloads. I am hopeful that won't happen though.

 

[MWRed]

A few times back in, like 2002 and before....before I really got into computers big time. Nothing major though, nothing that really caused a problem, other than being annoying. Since then, browsing habits changed, no more things like the original N**ster and Kaz**. Haven't had anything since.

Now, everything goes through various scans before I ever get to open it or anything.

 

[Yusifer]

Not really. I use AVG, Malwarebytes, and Super Anti-Spyware. The only thing they catch is cookies and some random, relatively harmless spyware.

Never had a trojan before.

 

[severedsolo]

once.... from a reputable site actually a forum I used to frequent, their server got a trojan on it, which downloaded itself the moment you logged in (XP/IE6 this was back in 2005) luckily my AV at the time (AVG) caught it before it could do any real damage, although it tried to replicate, but AVG caught each and every instance

 

[metalmania31]

Like many others I've been infected mostly in my early days of computing. When I was much more naive. I was still using IE. Pop-ups galore. Kazaa and so forth infected my system that I had to reinstall. Of course this led me to discover FF and all the anti-spyware apps like spybot, adaware, etc. Then I went to a tech school and learned even more and I haven't had any major issue with viruses or malware since 04-05 maybe. My family on the other hand is a different story. Just recently my parents PC got one of those fake anti-virus bugs. That one was a pain to kill. I had to down load a process killer to launch Malwarebytes or Trend micro. Even in safemode I couldn't launch any apps to clean. After killing the process I was able to clean it up and that's when I locked down there computer and put myself with an Admin account and theirs on a limited user account. So far so good. Plus I didn't run noscript on FF on theirs, but it's on their now.

 

[husky]

I really do not understand why some people run into malware so many times I have never ran into malware in my entire computing experience. I have confirmed it by running many many manual scanning programs and have never found anything.

All you have to do is use your common sense and 90 percent of programs will never appear...