Viruses, Trojans, and Malware. What, When and How to handle them.

I want to go over the what, when and how to handle this software dangers lurking about, and what protection and antivirus work best. The more input the better for others to learn from it. I will put in what happened to my system after losing 2 hardrives and a third one infected this last month as soon as I get a chance here at work.

I was having trouble keeping my system up a few months ago, and getting online. I ran Norton, Mcafee, Trend Antivirus but they picked up nothing. Then I moved the hardrive to another system to check it as it came up with a message that changes had occured, and when I moved it back, could not keep the computer up long enough to verify Microsofts validation, and Windows shut down.

I checked the harddrive on the other system and now during booting it came up that it was infected with a boot virus. So I built a new system with a new hardrive, but few weeks later it became infected with the boot virus even though Norton, Mcafee, Trend Antivirus showed nothing. I destroyed the harddrive, and infected the backup hardrive I had put on just for this contingency. I just built a third system without letting any files from the old system be put on the new hardrive, but did not trust Norton, Mcafee, or Trend Antivirus to guard this one so checked and found AVG and a similiar one Avast Antivirus which is much more effective in cleaning out the boot visus along with over 20-30 Trojans, Malware, and Viruses that were on my system that Norton, Mcafee, Trend Antivirus never saw. What is everyones experience, and what do you use to protect your system

Knock on wood!!!

I have never been infected by anything like you are describing.

I use the AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 2011.

So do I.

Will you no longer be able to use them? Or is there any way they can be cleaned?

The main harddrive was unrecoverable so its gone, the backup harddrive was a mirror image of the main, so it also had the virus. So I put it by itself to try and clean the virus off it. But the virus disabled parts of my system and would not let me get to the internet to download AVG Antivirus, and all the antiviruses I had running could not spot it or clean it. So I will have to take in to get my data off and format it to get rid of the boot virus, and whatever other nasty malware that got in.

Sounds like AVG is the antivirus of choice......

All my tech savy friends just look at me with that 'judgemental eye' as if I am 'terrible sinner' and keep telling me I must have gone to a 'really bad' website (Maritime??... ), and ask why I went 'there' and got 'infected'??.....not much help my techie friends....

I am very careful over where I go on the web and also scrutinize emails that I receive even from those I know, as it could reslly be from somebody else who managed to hack into their email account.

Well I know where I got the infection. I was using Merrium Webster dictionary for a topic on the forum, and every time I went to look up a word at http://www.merriam-webster.com/, a video kept playing on the right side. It looked like a ad but it had no identification, and finally after seeing it play for the 3rd or 4th time I clicked on SKIP THIS AD. I locked up, and a file was download which infected every program running and I crashed and I was done........

The ads on the right are paid for from different companies or enties and can be hacked or even misdirected to anohter site...be careful...

I cant believe I got infected on my new hardrives. It disabled my AVG antivirus but AVG stopped it from doing anything else. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling AVG but it was dead. So I went to my backup and restored my system to a recovery point that worked using Norton Ghost. Lost a lot of my Favorites and some other settings, but at least the system is back up and running. Now to figure out where the virus came from.....

Well be weary even of putting services such as CAPCHA as even they are being used to block let's say a sermon or study on the Sabbath, under the guise of stopping intrusion on political or 'controversial' issues.