Free lightweight anti-virus

[wildweasel]

One of the most common (these days) ways to get viruses is from infected ad banners, typically ones powered by Adobe Flash (they push craptons of security updates for a reason).

[SuperSomariDX]

Even worse being the ones that try to fool you into clicking them because of something is "infected" or "out of date". And you also got those "You win, click here to claim your prize" ads. I know this stuff is basic, but not everybody that own a computer, and that goes onto the internet knows these are fake. I mean.. I know, yes. But not everybody does, like my father for example. Ad goes "Your Flash player is out of date. Click to install yadda yadda."

Camouflaged Xvid virus/malware. Very nasty. Took me all day to get rid of it. Bleh.

[DoomRater]

CONGRADULATIONS, YOU WON!
....that damn ad I swear

[Graf Zahl]

Windows UAC is the best thing ever made.

UAC is basically a bad HIPS program, which is a central part of

I think that far too many people really have no idea what UAC really does, otherwise there wouldn't be so many nonsensical advices to turn it off.
The main issue here is write protecting the main system directories without the user's consent. This was quite common before UAC was invented and created a shitload of mess.

If you need more protection, feel free to install something more powerful but as it stands UAC is a low overhead basic protection against OS corruption, and it never pretends to be more. But it has stopped a few pieces of shitware from sneaking into my system.

[SuperSomariDX]

@DoomRater: Oh man, I got so tired of hearing that after I refreshed a page for a website I went to, I turned off my speakers just so I could have a peace of mind.

[Nevander]

your safest bet is to keep an updated antivirus software and scan everything you download

I should probably be asking this on an actual Microsoft board but seeing as how we are on the subject, I'll give it a try.

It seems every file I download is having some kind of extra data laced onto it, which results in twice as many files being reported as scanned by MSE. Yea yea I know the rep MSE gets but believe it or not, I don't believe MSE is at fault. I make a WAD file, scan it, it says one item was scanned right? That's normal and fine. Upload that same exact file somewhere online, download it myself, re-scan it, now suddenly there are TWO items scanned when nothing was changed in-between the original scan and the upload.

You may say maybe the upload site added something to the file, nope! I could download an attachment right here on the ZDoom forums and it would report two items. I'm thinking Firefox is the culprit. I already updated it to the latest version and that didn't help.

It's becoming rather concerning, especially since yesterday I downloaded a MIDI pack as a test that has 30 MIDI tracks and when scanned, it reports 60 ITEMS!

EDIT: It seems the file blocking feature of Windows is getting in the way. If I right-click a downloaded file and go into its properties, it will show as being blocked. If I unblock it and then scan it again, it reports one item as it should. This could explain why items from my own PC are only one item, since they aren't being blocked.

[ibm5155]

if you guys have time, you could get a virtual machine for just browsing and downloading stuff so any problem you get there it will stay over that virtual machine

Oh the ads, it's just funny browsing a random website on my smartphone that isn't android and get the popup (your android is infected, click in scan for removing the virus), and it's actually funny to see people without android actually clicking on "scan" (ofc they don't know what an android is and if they have one)

Adblock is actually cool for that, removing that annoy ads from websites, and just whitelisting good websites that dont make use of "flash update ads"