I think it’s silly fear mongering, and not that great a line of defense: turn computer off. As opposed to real security solutions like hardened O.S. models. I know you can’t advocate advanced approaches but seriously, “turn computer off” really takes the cake.

Let me know when you figure out how I can use a computer that’s turned off, since that would be step 2 in your solution.

For a start, each time one plugs in a USB storage device Windows immediately starts rummaging through it searching for a program to run, which on an infected device could easily be a virus, and there seems no permanent way of stopping this irritating feature.

Then there’s the insane default of suppressing file name suffixes in file explorer, so that a moderately crafty hacker could easily infiltrate a program called say funny_image.jpg.exe which an unsuspecting user would naturally double-click.

Also ActiveX and even Javascript seem to be riddled with bugs and vulnerabilities.

That’s three examples, and doubtless many more could be cited. I’m sure Microsoft are more than comfortable for viruses to be around up to a point and infecting PCs, because clearing a virus infestation is often a motive to do a clean install, and that is likely to involve a Windows upgrade at the same time.

Or are all malicious vira in reality made by Macowners? The hatred sounds so strong online that Windowsusers ought to have found some way to sabotage Macs by now.

If you’r XP PC is not patched, ans has this KB entry in your updates history, go to the windows update site now.

“Perhaps we should send a thank you note to the Spartans who sent us this magnificent horse…

There are seriously bad people out there, and whether or not this particular virus is cybergoedden is beyond the point…This is the blueprint for how a cyberwar will be carried out someday.

Also, this worm has infected the British Royal Navy and Parliament, the French Air Force, the Houston, Texas courts and police, and many others.

Clearly there is not that much incompetence in IT security around the world.
This beasty deserves watching

Even if you think your spyscanner or virusscanner got rid of it, it’s very wise to manually check. Pop into the system tools-> system information, click software environment->startup programs and look for things that are a fairly random string of ~7 letters. If you can’t find an actual process related, you’re still infected with it, despite whatever your anti-junk tools tell you.

This little nicker is really, really obnoxious, because you don’t have to do anything wrong to get it (unlike almost all others), and it’s basically immune to every protection, and no one seems to have an answer to actually gaining immunity to it.

I’m used to the type people write by exploiting security issues that are openly outlined in MS’s security bulletins and work by assuming enough people are too lazy to keep their patches up to date. Vundo is different. Very different.

However, somehow (probably through JavaScript), I ended up with an infection that AVG couldn’t detect, even after several days of update-and-scan cycles. It disabled Windows Update, Folder Options (after disabling viewing hidden files and hiding itself), and regedit. Then it proceeded to drop more and more virus and trojans on my machine (which AVG did detect).

I had to get the AVGRTK_remover VB script to fix the registry keys that were thwarting my attempts at removing the virus manually, and ended up using my work laptop to scan my HD over the network with Symantec to identify all of the viral files. It took the better part of a week to completely remove all traces.

So I was embarassed to have been infected, since I’m someone who “knows better,” but there was nothing that I did that was high-risk. Sometimes it just happens.

PC’s basically lack herd immunity- the number of viruses that are ‘unwashed’ is too high for the sheer number of users it can be propagated through. You only need a small percentage that haven’t updated their security, or to willingly install a virus from an email attachment, or whatever, to come up with a pretty grand problem.

<–I have both windows and unix machines. Neither has had a virus in years and years. Guess I just don’t open too many email attachments with bad grammer?

This is nother but another Y2K scenario. In the famous word of Sir W. S.

“Much ado about nothing”

“I was surprised. For IE 8, I’d give him a 9 out of 10. For Safari, maybe a 2. It’s just too easy to pop Safari. For Firefox on Windows, I give him a 10. That was the most impressive of the three. It’s really hard to exploit Firefox on Windows.”

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2941