Dodgy websites and the risk of infection.

Kovik

Hi.

While I'm at work, a housemate's brother often comes over and is always keen to use my computer (guess broadband hasn't penetrated Bray yet). I set him up with a Windows account for him so he can get online on his own and not stumble upon my private Van Halen text roleplaying work.

He was around today when I got back from buying a new duvet (living the dream, boys) and naturally he was at the PC. I asked him what he was up to. He said he was just surfing around. I glanced at the screen to see him cruising nearly a dozen tabbed professional wrestling gossip sites. We're talking websites that actively puke popups at you and devote some 80% of page space to advertisements and promises of "WATCH FREE VIDEOS OF EDWARD NORTON EATING A BADGER."

Anyway, this had me a little spooked. Until now I've lived in the delightful world of "I have firefox and McAfee, I am INDESTRUCTIBLE" so I've spent the evening running a few free system scans in addition to McCrapee and they all seem to be clean.

In any event, I have a wee question. What is the risk of picking up a piece of substantial Evilware by simply surfing around the dankest recesses of the intertrucks?

Also, if this account makes an appearance tomorrow screaming ***FIND A PARTNER IN THE <ireland> AREA TONIGHT!!!*** it's probably not me.

-annex-

Firefox is quite a safe browser out of the box, but you want total piece of mind you can install the noscript add-on. You'll then be able to allow scripts on a case by case basis, severely lowering chances of any type of infection.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

Also Firefox 3 is out tomorrow, it has a fair amount of new security features to warn you of potentially dangerous sites. Noscript is fully compatible with it.

ActorSeeksJob

I'd recommend following the steps in the Sticky Thread to be sure your PC is clean

mukki

remove mcaffe and edward norton from you pc, they're terribal