A few weeks ago, my room mate's computer got tanked by a nasty virus. The kind that was all-in-one doom for your comp deal. He took quick and decisive measures to stop it and now have a freshly reinstalled windows and such. It was quite possibly the worse virus I've ever seen, doing both ad/spy/malware with a worm eating data, a keylogger, and a really bad trojan, as well as fake ads for removal tools.
Point being not just that, but where he got it. It somehow bombed him from Outspark.com/forums which has threads for a game he was currently playing, a little like WoW only 2D and no so graphic. The game itself is geared for a younger and older audience alike. At first, he read posts about someone else there getting the virus. People blamed the occurance on the failure of the victim's protection and the admins shortly erased the thread. After my room mate's computer was hit, he made a post about the virus hitting him. It, too, was deleted but in only a few minutes.
Being a little pissed off, he wrote an email to the support guys at the outspark forums, outright he got a reply which pinned an explanation that his virus protection was weak. FYI: My roomy has really awesome protection, a lot better than mine. So I doubt that was the case. The support guy that replied said they are investigating the matter, which is more than what anyone has said about it thus far. But its likely other people are still subject to the virus, and this has been going on for some time (perhaps months) without any signs of improvement. The worse part is that most of the people on that forum are children.
I don't know what to think of any of that, except that its got to be the most horrendous thing I've ever encountered. If I had a site with a virus on it, I'd dedicate a few days to maintainence just to make sure its clean, even then, they should've had a clean forum in the first place and not blame it on the individual's protection. For a while it sounded shadey as well, but I'm kinda relieved they're at least investigating it.
c'mon man, think of the children!
Skals, Ant is right. Its really dumb to surf the web naked. There are some really good free protection apps out there, at least its a start.
A friend of mine wrote this article on securing Windows. Have a read.
That doesn't mean I like what they're doing.
You can make them undetectable by an easy l33t way, I turned one of those undetectable by Norton, Panda, Nod32, Kaspersky and more, so AV aren't that safe as you think.
PS. I never used it against others, just to learn.
Fail ;O!
EDIT - TESTED