You always hear about how dangerous the net is and how you can’t trust anything …
What is your experience ?
I ask because I have used computers since 1982 and NEVER has a virus done any harm to
my computer… Sure, there’s been some dial-up hijackers and the like but since I’ve never been
on dial-up that doesn’t matter much 
NOTE :
This is not about if your AV has told you that a file was “infected”, “suspicious” or anything else.
It’s only about “did something bad happen” !!
I must answer Yes but nothing bad seemed to happen, since I’ve executed some viruses to try with Defense+.
Also remember once when I installed Kazaa and then afterwards scanned with Avast and Spyware Doctor! Found around 30+ viruses and 200+ spyware or something 
But else, no virus has ever succeeded to execute itself on my computer. I’ve done more damage myself than any virus ever will 
Cheers,
Ragwing
Hmm, Avast is even more “paranoid” than Comodo … just as an example:
it treats almost all silent installers as a “trojan”… any compiled auto-it script is likely to be flagged …
Only once, back with my Olivetti 286 16 MHz 1 MB RAM. I had pirated some games :-[ and nothing bad ever happened. [HORROR STORY:] But once I resorted to one of the diskettes provided by Olivetty itself (or the retailer) with system files or whatver, it was one of those 5¼’‘. Since the source seemed trustworthy I didn’t bother scanning it --I don’t remember being specially careful at that time anyway. Well, the resulting blitzing infection didn’t damage COMMAND.COM or showed some funny “ur pwned” message. It just erased my hard drive through, of course all data were gone and it wasn’t even bootable any longer, had to reinstall DOS. I think I used other 3½’’ diskettes from the same source to do the reinstall.
(:LGH)
Yes, but then again, Kazaa was pretty well-known for being filled with malware, so I installed it, ran a scan.
Was going to re-format computer anyways, else I wouldn’t do that
I do. Am I a nerd now? 
Ha, but you didn’t ask what a 286 was, so you’re even nerder. (:WAV)
Some months ago downloaded some zipped trojan for some testing purposes. Unpacked, opened it in text editor (dont remember extension of virus, maybe scr or pif, or ocx…).
There was greeting of trojan’s author, some parameters to launch hdd format timer. Didn’t change anything, closed, deleted and forgot about case.
Then i noticed that on admin account by pressing ctrl+alt+del appears only blank window of task manager, without any menus, active apps etc.
Did not find easy way to fix it. But anyway now don’t care. Something called “sysfader” appears just for a second and then dissappears.
No virus was found, no real damage to system was done, only task manager was “hijacked” 
*rontokbro, crashed my comp (i’ve forgotten the exact story, but that’s really scary :o , i use Norman
Virus control to remove it )
*w32/silly, copy itself and hide the real ms word & ms excell files (on my friend’s comp)
*symantec AV (it’s a malware too ;D ) , cannot be uninstalled (i sell my comp to remove it )
it was on my other pc that i was downloading with bearshare and my pc would freeze up,very slow so i scanned with alot of av,as,rootkit scanner and online scanners and nothing was found, then i installed spyware doctor with av(resource hog) and did a complete scan and it found trojan.mailbot located in c:\windows\system32\xpdx.sys,it removed it and pc no longer froze or slowed to a crawl. when i googled it it said it was a kind of a rootkit and i should reformat,so i did to be safe.by the way i didnt have cpf3 or comodo boclean on that machine
LOL
You have more than 1300 posts, I would say just that makes you a “nerd” ;D
Nothing bad in being a nerd, only dorks don’t know that nerds are “way cool” (:NRD)
I once had a problem with a dialer, what wasn’t even a real problem because I already had ADSL, but it made me to get rid of the ■■■■■■ Norton Internet Security And Spybot S&D once found something I don’t remember :-\ But that was all a long time ago
Greetz, Red.
I once installed XP without service pack. Then I used a dial up modem to download sp2. unfortunately, while doing so a worm sneaked into my system (I think it was lsasss.exe or something like that).
another time I wanted to download some stuff and you had to use a program called netpumper. while installing netpumper my antivirus warned me several time about some spyware; but I really wanted to download that stuff and I didn’t know about virtualization at that time. so I decided to install netpumper with all its spyware, anyway, hoping that it would be easy to remove the spyware afterwads. :-[
unfortunatelly it wasn’t, because non of the freely available antispy progs (spybot, ad-aware, spyware-terminator, superantispayware, etc) were able to remove the spyware. only spyware doctor detected it, but sd was scanning only in the free version at that time. so finally i removed it somehow manually … :BNC
Hello,
I voted “No”, and there is no secret… I just not going to anykind of “strange” web sites like warez or porn ones nor clicking anywhere nor at any link somebody unknown can give me (on IRC by example), nor trust strange saying when my MSN contacts are infected.
The only ever virus I had where Blaster, and the only mistake à made was to not unplug the ethernet cable during Windows XP installation so I was unable to do anything to prevent it.
(:LGH)
This is really stupide for Windows to not temporally desactivate network connections during the installation…
The other secret is to have a true firewall with full statefull packet inspection inclued (that exclued the Windows one).
oh i’ve had this one too.
i’ve infected by “redlof” long time ago, but i didn’t see anything strange.
those only “3” really depressed me >:( expecially that rontokbro.
Lol i like how the option “silly question, I’m on a mac” isnt on there ;D
I think the option that says Stupid question, I use Linux !, isn’t a corrent answer, since there’s some viruses and worms for Linux, and also some for Mac, tho the list of viruses and worms for Windows would take around 50 ages to count (if we pretend no more viruses or worms would be created).
The ones for Linux and Mac can be written in like 1 minute ;D
Sometimes ago, you could not speak of anything without the question of European community being brought up; nowadays, you cannot see a single commercial for any product without ecological concerns.
Linux/Mac paraphernalia are just about the same, in french in the text, “tarte à la crème”.
More seriously, of course i got infected 2 or 3 times by trojans or viruses.
Someone evoked, he is right, not to plug any internet cable before installing a firewall:
but he omitted to say that to do that, you are supposed to have some safe partition or CD with the firewall’s executable.
Moreover, the risks become limited when you have different partitions for system, programs, working data, and downloaded executables.
So, how to get infected?
I do not use IE, i deny every attachment and html mail, but i surfed 2 or 3 times on “unofficial” websites.
What i wanted to point out is that i don’t think, in such a circumstance, any antivirus software to be reliable: if they detect something (and even a “false positive”), they will transfer it into a quarantine folder, and it will be a real pain in the … to get rid of it, rebooting in safe Ms Dos mode.
I am, with the same point of view, amazed with all the “Hijack this” logs everyone sees everywhere:
no one gets a word of it, and no one can because such a log won’t tell what the user did and where.
In almost every situation, manual clean-up of the system partition and of the registry entries is enough; even when it is not, with separate partitions where one has previously saved everything that deserves to be, you will spend less time to format and re-install then to handle quarantine and hijack logorrhea.
Well, being furthermore said that a virus will travel 100 times around the planet before the patch is online, antivirus softwares are bull…, aren’t they?
You think so? Looks like that Wikipedia article isn’t very thorough. 764 results for Linux alone:
Actually, it’s 561 malware for Linux (vulnerabilities isn’t malware, but PUPS might be). 65 for Mac, and 153,000(+?) for Windows! And that’s absolutely not of all of them…
Also Japo, with that I didn’t meant it could be done in 1 mintue, it was like saying “I’ll be back in a second”