I need no protection!!!

A fair few years ago, my brother was in the same position as the OP, he had a really nice Dell (shush :p ) and he connected to the internet, within an hour or so, he had a box pop up saying there was a problem with the RPC server and it had to shut down, with a countdown timer. It forced a reboot of his PC shortly afterwards, and every time he booted up, it happened. It was a virus. he had gone on no dodgy sites at all, yet the virus had found him.
Admittedly it was an XP machine with no service pack or modifications.
IIRC, it was the well known (and hated) sasser or blaster virus.
I think the moral of this story is that bot nets and the like are searching for 'open' computers with no protection, and if you don't have any, it will find you.
I do remember Click (Online) doing a test by connecting a PC to the internet, unprotected, (as my brothers was) and afair, it was only about an hour before the CPU was maxed out and 100's of rogue processes had been started.
You also have to ask yourself, how long will it be before Vista succumbs to the same level ? Days, weeks, months ?
 
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gronbek said:
So, tell me why do I need any protection ;)
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To stop you getting infected in the future.

The Twin Towers hadn't been attacked prior 11/09/2001 but it didn't mean they were never going to be. Had there been tighter security prior to the attack it could have been avoided all together.

Ok so that analogy is a little OTT but the logic holds true. Your system is powerful enough to run a AV without you ever noticing a difference in performance and should you ever get unlucky you'll be glad that you had it.

Many years ago when I used to buy PC Gamer, one of the cover CDs that came with it had a virus on it (iirc it was the one that had the Shogo demo on it). I didn't have a virus guard then and was installing software from what I considered a legit source and still got caught out. The whole thing would have been easier if I had an AV to catch it out in the first place.

Try giving Avast a go, the home edition is free and it has such a small system foot print that you won't notice it.
 
NathanE said:
Lies. A cross-platform vulnerability like that comes around like every decade... it certainly isn't left wide open for more than a few days after discovery. Microsoft especially are the market leaders at providing security patches. If a big enough vulnerability is discovered they will release a hot fix via WU within literally a couple days.
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You really think all vulnerabilties are reported to the vendors as soon as they are discovered? My previous pen test team didn't report them at all and kept them as our advantage when doing tests. This is a legitimate company as well. Immunity's business model for example is based on selling vulns to their customers who subscribe to their exploit pack without reporting to the vendor. https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-08/Frei/Presentation/bh-eu-08-frei.pdf

Not to mention all the blackhats out there and the price a remote vulnerability sells for...

Saying that Microsoft are getting much better response times these days, apple on the other hand are getting left behind. Microsoft used to be terrible at issuing patches.
 
Good day to you all!

I am going to install superantispyware tonight and see what it finds.
And maybe AVIRA or AVAST

BR Anders
thanks for all the nice replies :)
 
JimpsEd said:
Lies. http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3205516.ece
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It's just a trojan key logger? Boo hoo. Sorry but in order for something to be dangerous you need a viable delivery method... i.e. an exploit. The last really really really good one was the DCOM RPC exploit that MSBlaster used. That pretty much got almost everyone on the Internet... those types of vulnerabilities don't come around every day, or even every year. In fact MSBlaster was soooo bad that there has been an overkill reaction ever since (both by Microsoft and consumers themselves) to ensure it can't happen again. For instance just about everyone uses a firewall of some kind nowadays... and Windows Firewall is enabled by default... etc.

You said it was exploiting Unix and Windows systems, inferring that it was using the same vulnerability in both (but we can ignore that)...

I could write a program that prints "Hello world" but until I come up with a way to actually deliver that and make it spread it is useless. Unfortunately for malware developers, if a suitable hole like this exists it is usually patched on Windows very quickly. Vista has numerous layers of security and it has already proven itself to have around 60% less severe vulnerability issues than XP. Mainly thanks to UAC and the other security layers which help mitigate or reduce the severity of vulnerabilities. Vista's IE7 runs everything in a sandbox... so it doesn't matter how bad some Javascript is... it's only going to exploit the sandbox and not your actual PC.
 
NathanE said:
Vista's IE7 runs everything in a sandbox... so it doesn't matter how bad some Javascript is... it's only going to exploit the sandbox and not your actual PC.
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Assuming you havn't disabled UAC and therefore IE protected mode :rolleyes:

Burnsy
 
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Hi,

Just ran an updated SUPERantispyware and with a full scan of 16000+ files it detected 3 adware cookies. :)

Br Anders
 
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