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#51
I keep firewall turned on the router too although every now and than it may be nuisance.
I use Avast AIS and about every two weeks I install Malwarebytes and run a complete scan. I have never had a Virus but AIS has blocked some malware. In this day and age any site can give you malware.
I disagree because of what happened to a few people i know that had turned their firewall off only for a few minutes when connected to the net , it was scary.
They went from having no issues to having over 20 different trojan's within minutes , i couldn't believe it and never had a firewall disabled again.
When i got my first computer (three years ago) i read every article i could on security and every one said the same thing , always have a firewall and an AV , common sense 101 is what the articles said .
Anti malware forums are overloaded with people infected with malware asking for help and malware is more sophisticated today then ever before .
Lots of the malware today doesn't purposely wreak havoc and make it obvious that a computer user is infected , these days rootkits and bootkits sole purpose is to hide their activity.
Computers can run seemingly fine for months or even years without a computer user thinking there's anything wrong . Most AV's report everything's fine , the overwhelming majority of computer users utilize a firewall and AV these days at a minimum and most go a lot further than that for good reason.
If people don't want to use security knock yourselves out but your in an extreme minority.
im telling you right now that first statement is not true.there has been extensive effort to imbed viruses into video files and I have come across one in particular which was quite effective....the original file I downloaded was a standard video file from a share program similar to napster originally...I forget the original format but I converted the file to .avi with a reliable converter I have always used for years... the file converted fine but the virus still existed.....the virus I speak of served only one purpose to write a small file to any writable memory possible....I had converted the file to avi speciffically for the purpose of playing it on my ps2 and the virus still effectively wrote to my ps2 memory card....
I dont have the file anymore and dont have the skills to decompile how this was done but I know my experience and it does exist.... it may be as simple as using a pif editor as I used to do as a child to imbed pictures onto the background of my folders....especially if all they append to the file is write code xxx to *.* run code....and open a backdoor to your system....