Happy birthday, Windows XP!

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Hottentot

Or it expected me to have a brain.

Some time ago I was reading in a forum on malware, and there was this user who seriously boasted with that the never uses firewall and anti-virus, instead avoids threats by practicing what he called "intelligent surfing."

No, he did not receive much laughs or mockery, instead some very angry replies, and well-deserved, because this fool helps to spread inflections via his system without even being aware of his system being infested, and things like rootkits and drive-by-downloaded malware he obviously never had heard of. You must not even executer some file anymore by clicking or opening something to have these things going active. Just landing on a site is enough - not more is needed.

"Intelligent surfing". Well, I'm all for it. And part of intelligent surfing is to have a firewall, antivirus and malware solution on guard, always. And I mean commercial packages with the full allways-active feature set, not some downgraded testing versions with manually launched HD-scans only.

UAC is part of an overall strategy as well.

Most people whose systems are infested, are not aware that they are infested. Most involuntary members of zombie networks do not know they are part of a zombie network.

I am quite certain that if all subsim-member'S systems would be checked all at once for security breachings and malware being present, a very huge group, probably even the majority would have an unpleasant Aha!-experience.