If you’re not feeling paranoid enough today then read this.

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Of all the sinister things that Internet viruses do, this might be the worst: They can make you an unsuspecting collector of child pornography.


http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... wD9BRFQ680

Thats just f*****g scary. i am buying a mac for my next comp

That's f****d up. These piece of s**t pedophiles don't care if their innocent victims get gang raped in prison for this. They should give someone triple life for doing this type of s**t.

It used to be that the police planted heroin on you when they wanted to bust you.

ohhh my god! Wow

from one PC to another... People think PC as in Windows ONLY and Mac as in Mac OS. Never a mention of a better OS.

These are just typical viruses that people unwittingly download and let the computer run. After all, a virus must be allowed to run before it can do anything.

I work in computer security field.

Virus infection = 99% user's fault.

Yeah your fault. Almost always.

There have been a few viruses which exploited flaws in the OS or the apps. But by and large the viruses require user's interaction to execute and infect the machine. An example would be downloading strange executables from the Internet, or opening executable e-mail attachments, or tampering with your web browser's security settings.

An infection vector usually requires the user to do something stupid like turn off the firewall (it is on by default) or not install updates (automatic updates are on by default) or turn off the e-mail client or the web browser security features (they are on by default).

I've done all sorts of what is percieved as risky behavior on my computers over the years: e-mail, downloading, surfing questionable sites, etc... But I've left computer's security features alone, I've never run odd programs from the Internet, and I never open attachments from people I don't know.

Last time I got a virus was in 1991. I was a senior in high school and Michelangelo virus infected all my 5.25" floppy disks.

Ditto that with the addition of one a couple of years ago due to Microsoft being slow to patch a flaw in the exploit of JPG files. While surfing one day the browser suddenly crashed saying it needed to close. I had a bad feeling about it and immediately ran a virus check and sure enough one had hit my computer but was immediately cleaned off.

I remember the Michelangelo virus, I was an IT manager at the time and ended up visiting each of my employers business sites to check every PC. Turned out the infection had come in through someone bringing in a game on an infected 5.25" floppy disk. From that computer it had propagated throughout the organisation via 5.25" disk. That was a wake up call and all the sites subscribed to Dr Solomons anti virus and a company wide anti virus policy adopted.

Edit: I'll just add that while you are right about it "almost always" requiring user intervention or action to let viruses in, it is easy to say that for those of us techies. Those most likely to get infections are those who know less about computer security or those who don't really care anyway. I think if the average computer illiterate granny got a pop up saying their "computer had caught a virus and they should click this button to allow Microsoft to remove the virus and clean up their computer" they will happily click it allowing the trojan access to their computer. Blissfully unaware that the warning message was not from their own computers operating system. I read that a lot of people have fallen foul to this type of attack recently and had been lured into installing malware or fake anti-virus software.

That happened to me with my old Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop back in '07. I was using M$ Internet Exploder
and Norton anti-virus and all it took was one visit to a questionable site and I got hit with all sorts of malware.....Last time I had a virus was last year I was using Norton 360 and I visited a pr0n-site and
I got hit with something called "generic 187" that Norton did not block and could not remove. I had to scrap
and reinstall my entire XP partition. Since then I use Avast and I have the trial version which requires
active measures on my part to renew and reinstall every few weeks with a full system scan. Web of Trust
is another useful tool for avoiding trouble sites.

This is another reason why I'm glad I have a Mac, and my next computer will be a Mac. Even then, if I don't recognize someone's e-mail address, I automatically classify it as spam as there are scammers out there who are after passwords.

Mac's aren't inherently more secure than Windows PC's, it is just there are fewer Mac's so malware writers don't target them as much. Too much complacency on the part of Mac users may turn out to be their undoing. The same applies to Linux.

There is no substitute for vigilance.

Or, as we used to say back in my C-64 days, "always practice safe hex."

Mmm... that's probably the case for Vista and Windows 7 vs OS10 / Linux, but not for XP, which is inherently a bit less secure. But yeah, most of the Mac's safety from viruses is just down to their (deserved sorry!) unpopularity.

I wouldn't agree that 99% of computer viruses are the user's fault, but it's certainly an annoyingly high percentage. People just don't seem to care.

I've often come across the "don't care" attitude. Mainly amongst kids or adults who don't use their computer for anything sensitive like online banking. They think of viruses as a minor irritation of no importance. It tends to be those people's computers that become part of bot-nets and send out the thousands of spam emails and are possibly caches for undesirable illegal content. They remain clueless until either serious symptoms manifest on their computer or the police kick their front door in at 3 am.

My internet provider is a major phone company.

As part of their service they offer access to thousands of the many thousand "newsgroups"

Just for laughs I searched for "child", "teenage" and "Lolita".

I was offered pictures that would make you throw up.

These are pictures that my internet provider hosts on their own servers for their members to download.

So why does no one sue them for hosting and providing porn?