Was reading about the latest malvertising exploit on bleepingcomputer when lo and behold, said malvertising ad hit and tried to take over my PC.
That was the last time I used the internet without an adblocker.
I do have to admire the irony of a malvertising ad hitting bleepingcomputer on the article about said ad.
I think lot of people don’t realize that you can get malware just from browser vulnerabilities, and not just from downloading and running malicious files. Adblocking isn’t just an issue of annoyance, it’s an important security tool.
Personal: Booted up a friend’s infected disk on my Amiga, which then infected the HD. Mass panic for ten minutes or so as I ran Virus Checker or VirusZ on it.
Work: In 2003-ish we had an infection of… I can’t even remember the name of it, but we had to manually go round and run a program on everybody’s computer to get rid of it.
Since then I’ve seen a few people get their files encrypted by Ransomware, but no major infections.
Some time around 2010 or so I found a FREE DOWNLOAD for some software I wanted on Youtube. Normally I wouldn’t fall for such a thing, but the video had a huge amount of likes and a basically no dislikes so I thought it was legit (I wasn’t well-acquainted with the concept of view bots). Ended up with some nasty malware, had to reinstall. Don’t run executables off youtube, kids.
Also there was a point before that I got ultra-paranoid about my computer having a virus, and I would Google processes in task manager and got super scared and installed some fake rogue antivirus from a ‘company’ called Uniblue. A lot of their ‘marketing’ was pretending they were part of Microsoft, and I thought it was super legit. It wasn’t. Turns out being paranoid about computer security when you are completely computer illiterate is a perfect way to get malware.
Turns out being paranoid about computer security when you are completely computer illiterate is a perfect way to get malware.
Very true
Was installing Windows XP and forgot to unplug the computer from the internet. It got a virus during install.
How 😭
