The Core

MS Security Essentials has been getting great reviews in the mainstream PC mags for its free security.  We moved away from AVG paid to this to simplify.  Bad move.

While doing some competitor backlink research I downloaded a trojan just by surfing to a potential backlink provider (.php file).  Didn't click anything but it did its thing and MS Security Essentials couldn't remove it (although it kept catching, trojan kept reinfecting).

Had to resort to Norton Internet Security to deal with it (which also found a keystroke logger entry in the registry - not sure how long that had been there).  Have been pleasantly surprised by Norton's move away from bloatware/resource hogging.  Been a nice tool for the last couple weeks.

FYI

>symptoms of infection

Incessant forum addiction

Process:

1) Notice Firefox register a download that you didn't initiate
2) See strange .php file on desktop (didn't click it of course)
3) Start running MSE
4) MSE flags it as a trojan and says it is quarantined
5) Run system wide scan, MSE keeps finding it over and over again even though it says it quarantined

I think it was actually Malware Bytes that finally got rid of it now that I remember.  Then I got Norton and scanned and found the registry entry.  Decided to stay with Norton's active protection rather than paying for Malware Bytes' active.

A few months back Yahoo, Google, and CNET advertising networks were hit, injecting software on display advert load.  Both my wife and I got hit with the same kind of thing just by surfing.  Scary to see major networks hit:

The problem of ads delivering malware to Web surfers cropped up last year when visitors to The New York Times got hit. Another wave came earlier this year when the Drudge Report was targeted. Even ad platforms as big as Google's and Yahoo's were found to be delivering malicious ads.

Armorize scanned the Alexa top-ranked 200,000 Web sites and found that 1 percent were infected with malware that can be used in drive-by downloads.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20005969-245.html