porn is blocked at my router in my home, going to upgrade the router to filter viruses and suspect rogue sites.

I run AVG Free and Microsoft Security Essentials. The occasional malwarebytes if I get something nasty.

Have to say, I have found more viruses on the NG's than any other way. Still love the NG's though =)

yeah, ng's are getting loaded, fake movies, fake apps all happen to be the same file size is the give-away.

With the years I have spent downloading from the NGs I can spot bad shit real easy. You need to pay attention to the files labels and the groups they are posted to. File size is usually a big give-away. For apps, I always scan files before executing them, also I hover mouse pointer over file and check the properties for the file (fake stuff has little to no info or bad info).

Most people just grab the first thing they find and don't think twice before clicking on it.

yeah, multiple different apps that all happen to be the same file size.

spyblaster 1012kb
photoshop cs3 1012kb

shit like that and it serves an idiot right to get their pc fucked up cause even a half braindead moron knows adobe pscs3 is huge.

or the fool who downloads music with an exe extension.


and they don't learn, they'll go back and do the same exact thing even after we explain to them then they call us saying we didn't clean it and we look in their history and say you went back to that site. those who clear their history we look in their temp files and go so you didn't listen.
then they lie and try to say that must have been there from the last time, we go no, we deleted everything in your temp, plus the date on those files are after we returned your pc.

then I sit on the phone waiting for them to decide what they want to do cause we ain't fixing shit for free.

I agree with what's said, and usually I can spot the obvious bogus files. It gets harder when looking for some sort of a k*yg*n because they are so small to begin with. But I will say, AVG free does a fine job of scanning them before I can even get to the directory.

I should add that I have found a few very legitimate-looking isos with autorun.inf's trying to load viruses. In one case, the package was otherwise legit, it was the real deal except for the virus shit. Good thing I keep autorun disabled anyway.

A lot of K*yG*ns will get tagged as a virus/trojan/malware, but they are clean. It has something to do with the way the EXE is created.

People are now adding shit on to an otherwise legit piece of software.

We use spybot and ad-aware for spyware problems, and for virus-scan we use Symantec Antivirus. Never had an issue with either of them.

Fortunately haven't had to use them much, but on this computer we've been pretty download-safe.