Wednesday 2 March 2011

Why you need good security protection, even if you only visit well known and trusted websites

The BBC reported today that many Britons had been caught out by booby trapped ads on the web last weekend.  Curiously I received several calls on Sunday and Monday to sort out machines affected by virus infections from users who were pretty certain they had not been anywhere untoward on the internet.

Most of these were from what I call 'ransomware' which complained that the machines were infected and demanded money for an 'upgrade' to remove them.  Thankfully these were straightforward to remove for good.

To get to my point;  Probably these users like the ones quoted by the BBC were served infected ads from a reputable website who was supplied the ads in turn by another reputable company whose own systems had seemingly been compromised in some way.

I'm not sure if it was the same thing but while loading an innocuous page from ebay about bathroom accessories, by Symantec security software blocked 'attempted suspicious activity' quite likely in my opinion given the circumstantial evidence that this too may have been one of these infected ads.

It's only an opinion, but piad for AV software is more comprehensively reliable than free versions, and saves users from the hassle of recovering from situations like these.