Virus Invasion at Large

"One recent sunday afternoon, a woman phoned Ed Finn from her apartment in northern Virginia, complaining that pornographic icons were popping up across her computer screen. As the owner of a Washington, D.C.–area Rescuecom franchise, Finn spends his days servicing home PCs, and this woman needed his help urgently. The Click-Here-For-Sexy-Bod icons were soon joined by Internet gambling links and countless browser pop-ups, each less wholesome than the last, popping up faster than she could close them.

When Finn arrived, he discovered more than 80 pieces of malicious code on the woman's PC, and it wasn't hard to see why. She hadn't installed a firewall or an antispyware program; although her PC came with antivirus software, she hadn't bothered to activate it, assuming she was protected since it was included. Her machine was about as well protected as General Custer at Little Bighorn, completely exposed to every virus, worm, Trojan horse, and foul strand of spyware lurking on the Internet.

The nasties were entrenched to the point where Finn had no choice but to back up the woman's data and reformat her hard drive. He was almost finished when her roommate came running down the stairs in a panic. Pornographic icons were popping up across his computer screen, too.

Cast an eye over the current state of Internet security, and there's a certain sense of déjà vu. We're living the same bad dream over and over.
" - Excerpt from"The Sorry State of Security" - PC Magazine