How am I getting so many viruses?

External Since: Oct 11, 2003 Posts: 2

My email is web-based and it's all spam anyway so I delete it. I surf
to a few familiar sites like Ebay or CNN.com. I never download
anything anymore except f-prot updates. So how is it I'm getting
constantly infected with annoyance viruses? How the heck are they
getting in? Right off the internet?

External Since: Aug 20, 2003 Posts: 43

On 11 Oct 2003 08:23:42 -0700, robbybarkan RemoveThis @yahoo.com (robby) wrote:

>My email is web-based and it's all spam anyway so I delete it. I surf
>to a few familiar sites like Ebay or CNN.com. I never download
>anything anymore except f-prot updates. So how is it I'm getting
>constantly infected with annoyance viruses? How the heck are they
>getting in? Right off the internet?

Not every malicious program is a virus or even a worm - many are what
are called adware or spyware. And there are things called exploits.
If you use IE, you are vulnerable to all categories found in e-mail or
web pages. In addition, if you use NT/W2k/XP without the latest
patches, you are vulnerable to some worms that attack just because the
machine is on line and vulnerable. Even if you have the latest
patches, you are still vulnerable to some exploits for which the
patches themselves contain (or don't fix) similar or identical
vulnerabilities.

T.E.D. (tdavis@gearbox.maem.umr.edu - e-mail must contain "T.E.D." or my .sig in the body)