A Story that Happens Way too Often

The other day, a friend was bragging that he was perfectly safe. He was "careful" when he surfed the web, and besides, viruses and malware was something that happened to people with sloppy habits or who visited pornographic or hacker websites. He, of course, never did any such thing, so he was safe, or so he thought.

One day he asked me to look at his computer because it was running a little bit slow and he was getting annoyed with frequent popups. Oh, the things I found! His computer was infected with over a hundred different pieces of malware and was part of a botnet. Every keystroke was transmitted to hackers, and all of his passwords and accounts were compromised. Many files on his hard disk had been infected, and his computer was actively sending out spam, attacking systems, and being used for other nefarious purposes.

Naturally, he didn't have any backups, so there was no recovery. I saved what I could, and that wasn't much, completely erased the disk drives (all of them), and reinstalled.

Oh yes, and the browser cache proved someone (most likely his teenage son) had been visiting a vast number of pornographic websites. This was a possible source of infection, although the malware could have come from just about anywhere. 

My friend was not practicing safe computing, and because of that, he lost virtually all of his family photos, tax documents, financial records and everything else he had stored in his system.

It's impossible to be 100%, perfect safe in the world of the internet and computers. Even inserting a flash drive can lead to infection. But you can follow some simple guidelines and install some applications, may of them free, to improve your odds and keep your system and files free from malware.

Richard G Lowe Jr ◆ https://www.leavemycomputeralone.com
Author of Safe Computing is Like Safe Sex: You Have to Practice it to Avoid Infection