Viruses are "overated" and don't even do anything

V

vonfeldt7

New Member
I don't understand why people get so crazy about Viruses. In my experience, they don't even do anything. I remember back when I had my Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) and 256MB of RAM running WinXP (and for a time, Windows ME). I would scan with Norton every few months, find TONS of infections, and once it fixed everything, it wasn't any faster at all. Maybe it's because it was soo slow to start with, I dont know.

And that's IF you can get a Virus. I'm on the internet ALL THE TIME and I'll do a scan every few months...just to find nothing. (AVG). I'm downloading all kinds of stuff, and still have no Viruses. Then again, I'm halfway smart and have common sense (IE: When my friend says on msn "Lolz like omg like lolz look at this foto" and the file says "hilarious.exe" it's obviously not a "foto").

Not to say that you can't get Viruses, and that they don't do anything, that's just been my experience (thankfully). Now spyware on the other hand...that I've had my fair share of. (Although I usually find that most of it doesn't seem to do anything either).

This has just been my experience...am I the rule? Or the exception?
 
vonfeldt7 said:
I don't understand why people get so crazy about Viruses. In my experience, they don't even do anything.
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says the person using protection. ALL if not 99.999% of antivirus products protects from MAJOR viruses. it's the semi-harmless to minor viruses that seperates the brands.

my sister and friends had major viruses thanks to not not having an antivirus program installed. their conditions were either: restart computer when opening MS word, random restarts, random bsod, not being able to execute programs, and the like.
 
Just wait when you are at work and see a self propagating network active virus pop up in your email server. You'll then learn to understand the severity of the threat.
 
well the point is you catch, them. what if you hadn't? virus' can be used to keylog steal details etc. Or more commonly they can be used for ddos or to send spam emails (which you probably wouldnt even realise was happening...so i guess for the most part you personally dont know anything is wrong, but that doesnt mean its not doing anything.

you could just be another drone pc :)_
 
tlarkin said:
Just wait when you are at work and see a self propagating network active virus pop up in your email server. You'll then learn to understand the severity of the threat.
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I'll be laughing with you. Viruses def are real and you can get them from virtually opening a email from someone who had a virus and didnt even know it. All viruses really do is slow your system down alot and start to delete or corrupt needed windows files.
 
Lol. Get rid of the antivirus/antispyware, and install windows fresh without any security updates and such and go roaming around for a couple months. You probably wouldn't be a happy camper by the end.


Yes though, antivirus software and updated OS's really do help to battle infection. This makes viruses seem like they do nothing and seems impossible to get infected by anything major. But they are still out there and can cause some pretty bad things to happen. CIH and Magistr come to mind as pretty destructive ones that were around a few years ago.

Viruses used to be about destruction/humiliation/popularity and such but things have been going a different direction lately imo. There are still those viruses whose point is destruction, but I believe it is more about money. This is why most don't make a big scene and why spyware is so popular (using that term very loosely lol). Why destroy data, when you can sit in hiding just pilfering data that can be worth quite a bit of money.

Ehh, viruses/malware are bad. Have been and will be.
 
Nightrain said:
Lol. Get rid of the antivirus/antispyware, and install windows fresh without any security updates and such and go roaming around for a couple months. You probably wouldn't be a happy camper by the end.


Yes though, antivirus software and updated OS's really do help to battle infection. This makes viruses seem like they do nothing and seems impossible to get infected by anything major. But they are still out there and can cause some pretty bad things to happen. CIH and Magistr come to mind as pretty destructive ones that were around a few years ago.

Viruses used to be about destruction/humiliation/popularity and such but things have been going a different direction lately imo. There are still those viruses whose point is destruction, but I believe it is more about money. This is why most don't make a big scene and why spyware is so popular (using that term very loosely lol). Why destroy data, when you can sit in hiding just pilfering data that can be worth quite a bit of money.

Ehh, viruses/malware are bad. Have been and will be.
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LOL!! Yup My moms pc running w/o antivirus and she got a virus in 3days I think. Some stupid guy that reformated her hdd didnt install antivirus and said it wasnt needed. After the 3days I reformated it again and installed Avast Pro for her. Yeah without antivirus you will have atleast 40 IE pop-ups and a couple of freezes. LOL
 
Nightrain said:
Lol. Get rid of the antivirus/antispyware, and install windows fresh without any security updates and such and go roaming around for a couple months. You probably wouldn't be a happy camper by the end.


Yes though, antivirus software and updated OS's really do help to battle infection. This makes viruses seem like they do nothing and seems impossible to get infected by anything major. But they are still out there and can cause some pretty bad things to happen. CIH and Magistr come to mind as pretty destructive ones that were around a few years ago.

Viruses used to be about destruction/humiliation/popularity and such but things have been going a different direction lately imo. There are still those viruses whose point is destruction, but I believe it is more about money. This is why most don't make a big scene and why spyware is so popular (using that term very loosely lol). Why destroy data, when you can sit in hiding just pilfering data that can be worth quite a bit of money.

Ehh, viruses/malware are bad. Have been and will be.
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Actually I do not run any Anti-Virus software on my windows XP machine at all. I have a router running NAT + SPI firewall, and that is it. I am virus free. I don't use any P2P software (like limewire, that is a quick way to get a virus) with the exception of torrents, but even then I don't download anything that is not legal and I view the contents before I agree to download it.

I don't go to malicious sites, warez or hacker sites, and I don't do anything stupid like download and run email attachments.

I have been running my windows boxes like this since about 2001ish and have been virus free since then.

The problem is, your average user can't follow these steps so they do in fact need virus protection.
 
I am virus free.
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eh? how the heck do you know that? just decause the screen doesnt pop up and say Im a virus na-na-nana-na
I hate it when people say that. If you dont run a virus scanner you cant say that, if you do run a virus scanner...you still cant say that with 100% conviction
 
apj101 said:
eh? how the heck do you know that? just decause the screen doesnt pop up and say Im a virus na-na-nana-na
I hate it when people say that. If you dont run a virus scanner you cant say that, if you do run a virus scanner...you still cant say that with 100% conviction
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How would it get on my system in the first place? And yes, I do download a scanner and run a check every so often and then get rid of the scanner.

My system is stable and runs fine, no sign of a virus or a trojan or anything.
 
tlarkin said:
How would it get on my system in the first place? And yes, I do download a scanner and run a check every so often and then get rid of the scanner.

My system is stable and runs fine, no sign of a virus or a trojan or anything.
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well you do scan occational. You know more about this than me but there are still all the non inbound ways i.e emails, those torrents ;) - ever get self extracting zips or rars. And sure you say " i never do these things" well im sure you dont most of the time, but im sure you have at somepoint.

Moreover, the most likley route is jsut the normal browsing method. A dodgy link, clicking the wrong part of a pop-up etc. Even totally legit sites can distribute virus/malware - i often follow links that someone of CF posts saying "check out my site and let me know if i can improve it blah blah blah"; and once the outbound connection is established then the spi firewall will happily let the packets flooowwwww :)
 
OK, let me be a bit more specific.

NAT does not allow any remote hosts to connect to my network unless they are tunneled through my router. Which I would have to grant access to that, and I do because I VNC into my home network from the interwebs.

Torrents - download them on my Mac and Linux box. UTorrent allows you to view the files before downloading. I also use trusted and private trackers mostly. There are other versions of torrent clients that allow the same features of uTorrent.

I don't download email attachments.

There is really no way for a virus to get onto my system, unless I allow it to, and for the most part I am very careful and if I do get one, I can only blame myself.

Almost every virus I have ever seen on a system made it pretty obvious that a virus was present.
 
tlarkin said:
There is really no way for a virus to get onto my system, unless I allow it to, and for the most part I am very careful and if I do get one, I can only blame myself.

Almost every virus I have ever seen on a system made it pretty obvious that a virus was present.
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I used to think that way too... until I got a virus that was hidden in a totally innocent-looking .jpeg. I even got one during the legitimate BartPE download, as well as a trojan just going to http://www.google.com !
If it weren't for AV software, I'd have been up a creek.
Tom
 
OvenMaster said:
I used to think that way too... until I got a virus that was hidden in a totally innocent-looking .jpeg. I even got one during the legitimate BartPE download, as well as a trojan just going to http://www.google.com !
If it weren't for AV software, I'd have been up a creek.
Tom
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Yeah I occasionally scan, but I don't keep it as a running process.
 
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