Vocal Voices

I have been reading this board this morning, with all your problems of virus', malware, pop ups, dodgy emails, and wonder why we have never, ever had a problem with any of it. We never shut the computer down and every morning it is up and running all ready for me.

Its a good job it is, as I don't understand a word of it

You do know what will happen now that you have said something.........?

T'Universe doesn't know everything, tha knows, not till you tell it.

Oh yes, you shouldn't have said that. You know what's going to happen now!

Hi MM,

I did a potentially very dangerous thing. With full knowledge of the consequences and all the tools to recover the mess if required. I did get the required end result, which was the mess of old files and settings removed. Also I have refreshed the base install of Windows7. I've been playing with the idea that I could upgrade to Windows8 for quite a while now. It's faster and leaner, but I just can't stand the interface for day to day working. I have far too customised a machine and I know from my Laptop just how irritating it can become.

For normal day to day work, I never see any of these Virus issues. I do see loads of dodgy emails, but then I'm subscribed to, quite literally, hundreds of places who have my email address. Many of whom have a policy of selling on the information for money. I also see the popups, but then I go places where the sites try to attack my machine from the second I hit the site. The benefits outweigh the hassle with popups. They have to make money somehow.

If you have a good AV/Firewall suite, have a decent email provider, keep your windows up to date, don't give your email address to all and sundry (for sites who simply do not need my email address, they get noddy@toytown.com which is a valid address), then you are extremely unlikely to see most of this malware. Also facebook is becoming a major feeder to malware with open information which they can harvest addresses from.

There is no need to have malware attacking you, no need to be affected by most of the problems seen. Windows now asks if you really do want to install stuff, which catches most of the junk, quality anti virus and firewall suites do exist but you have to pay for them.

Also, something which is never considered nowadays but was a big issue at the beginning of broadband, is home routers. Almost everyone, today, who accesses the internet, does so from behind a router, which has it's own firewall. People with so called adsl "modems" are massively at risk because of the lack of that firewall. This has all but died out due to the very low price of routers, but some still exist.

It is not so unusual for people to run for years without issues of this kind. But you will find that those people have limited browsing lifestyles, do not click on links, do not launch attachments from mail and have paid protection installed on the machine. Also, usually, they don't install freeware tools which then frag the whole system.

So long as you continue to work the way you do, I see no reason why you should ever be infected or have any problems beyond the usual 5 year hardware MTBF (mean time between failure), issues.

I guess I'm one of those people that, as Suff says, has a "limited browsing lifestyle, ..... and have paid protection installed on the machine." But even so, I think it's very easy to find yourself nearly being conned by malware and viruses, and I did very nearly fall for the Adobe Flash Update via Google scam that Suff mentioned recently on another thread - luckily, my protection programme went off like a fire-cracker and told me I was heading into a malicious site ...

So you have to constantly have your wits about you, which is one of the reasons I'm unadventurous on the internet, even to the extent that my bankers actually asked me, last time I went into the branch, why their system shows I don't regularly use internet banking ... (Not that it's any business of theirs how I conduct my affairs, surely).

But even with all this caution and protection - I can see from my regular scans that I still get viruses quarantined, probably at least twice a month (seems to be a preponderance of Java Exploit viruses).

And as for installing freeware tools which then frag the whole system, I'm more than happy to leave that to the experts!

The point about active firewalls ossie. My virus scanner only ever finds tracking cookies and the keygen/password crackers I have on my machine which are legit (well to me) and I have to exclude.

I never find anything else, adware, malwarebytes, none of the top spyware stuff finds anything. It just doesn't get in from the browser as the firewall/AV blocks it before it can even execute. It doesn't even tell me it's done it, it just gets on with it.