Want a Virus? Browse the Net.

I have had eight virus calls in less than one week, and every­one was infected by sim­ply brows­ing web­pages with their browser. You know, just surf­ing the Inter­net. Now before you go off and believe these sites were porno­graphic and free music/movies/games type web­sites, think again.

They were social net­work­ing sites, bank­ing sites, and typ­i­cal web­sites we visit and trust every­day. I started research­ing, and dis­cov­ered that there were at one point 100,000 web sites infected with one par­tic­u­lar style of virus.

I have learned the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion along my quest:

• Inter­net Explorer is extremely vul­ner­a­ble to attack. Out of the eight peo­ple I helped, all of them were using Inter­net Explorer as their pri­mary web browser.
• Remote sup­port can­not help you. Out of the eight peo­ple I helped, AT&T Sup­port­Plus charged $129 to remove the viruses. The end result was a com­puter that was still infected, and could not con­nect to the Inter­net any­more. Each per­son who requested a refund were given a sup­port ticket number.
• Virus scans came up clean. Nor­ton, McAfee, Ewido, Mal­ware­bytes, and even AVG Free did not detect the virus.
• The only way to recover the com­puter is by back­ing up your files and rein­stalling Win­dows from a CD, and not the sys­tem recov­ery par­ti­tion on your hard drive. (Make sure you do not save any exe, src, and pos­si­bly zip files.
• The best way to remove these viruses is by pro­tect­ing your browser. I have had good for­tune using Google Chrome and AVG Inter­net Secu­rity (which pro­vides solid browser pro­tec­tion for Chrome, Fire­fox, and Inter­net Explorer).

I was shocked to learn that so many anti virus solu­tions did not have browser pro­tec­tion, and I was also sur­prised that Microsoft hasn’t been proac­tive with patch­ing their browser, or the server side soft­ware that allow these exploits to take place. I clicked on an inno­cent Adver­tise­ment on a pop­u­lar web site, and AVG imme­di­ately told me the related site was try­ing to pass a virus onto my computer.

This is nice for those of us who know about AVG, but how many peo­ple do not know about AVG, and place their trust in big brand crappy virus pro­tec­tion like McAfee, Nor­ton, and Trend Micro.

I am deal­ing with these poly­mor­phic viruses every­where, so if you have not been infected, thank God. But don’t stretch your luck, I rec­om­mend that you migrate to a secure browser like Google Chrome, and pur­chase AVG Inter­net Secu­rity. I can’t vouch for any other solution.

AVG is run­ning a sale as we speak by offer­ing AVG Inter­net Secu­rity 9.0 for $54, which will pro­tect (1) com­puter for 2 years , they also have a 3-pack run­ning for $103, and they have a great deal for busi­nesses with the AVG Anti-Virus Net­work Edi­tion, where you can get 2 years of pro­tec­tion for 5 com­put­ers for $239.

The bot­tom line is that you need to look closer at your com­puter secu­rity, and now isn’t the time to play cheap. It cost all eight of the peo­ple I helped at least $180 on top of the $129 that they paid AT&T Sup­port Plus, which they are fight­ing to have refunded.

You can save about $120 buy pro­tect­ing your­self before­hand, and save your­self hours on the tele­phone with tech­ni­cal sup­port, and elim­i­nate the has­sle of try­ing to backup your files ten min­utes before the tech­ni­cian stops by. Remem­ber this: An ounce of pre­ven­tion is worth a pound of cure.