In my experience fixing my own and other's computers, the two biggest distributors of viruses I've seen are free cursors and porn.

Free cursors?

I think he's referring to those really annoying pop-up ads that generally look like this:



As for porn, I'd prefer not to post an example here.

Strange, I have never encountered one of those. Smiley ads, on the other hand...

I see those all the time. My mom does not click those, but i did find out where the viri came from. My email started sending out spam, she got one and opened it, (Was from me, so she was not worried) It was empty except for one attachment that I found.... 12 random numbers. So I changed my password on my email, and I am watching her and my other email accounts. So far it has not happened again.

I use yahoo, so its odd that there was a virus in there.

You actually should at least have adblock or noscript installed, since Flash and Javascript vulnerabilities are common attack vectors, and they can come in through compromised advertising providers on even legitimate sites.



"should" being the operative word there

How do I disable autorun? NOt a huge deal for my mom, but I need to know when I do PC work. Using linux, if you did not guess that. :p. Also, yea she uses flash a lot, but facebook is a huge problem in itself. If it is a virus, i will talk my mom into using avast. If not, well, moms are hard headed and stubborn. But they USUALLY come through.

Google, for starters

Sometimes I wonder why I bother. You mention it, least you can do is say how. I am guessing you know right off hand. Every time I google Linux stuff I get a whole lot of stuff that does not work, then come back here. Say google did not work for me, and you end up telling me anyway. Not just you. Others do that too. really annoying.

IRC works as well (think freenode)

I don't. It's something I do at most once every 2 years. The key things is knowing that it needs to be done.



This usually means one of two things:

• You structured your query wrongly
  
• It isn't a question to which we have a ready answer, because it is uncommon enough that Google hasn't seen it before, but we'll help you work through it as a team.
  

In the nicest way possible, you should really read this document.

Sorry. My brain does not work well that late at night. On top of being pissed at a program that refuses to work. I will post the program here later. Very sorry elf prince, and to the rest of you.

Seana: as for IRC, the only channel I can really use, is #cemetech. I have trouble talking to people I dont know.

True, Googling Linux stuff can be challenging if you're not very sure what's you're looking for in the first place. But Elfprince was suggesting that you google how to disable AutoRun; the first Google links for "Windows disable autorun", "Windows 7 disable autorun", and even "disable autorun" give you exactly what you need to know.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what I did.

That would be good, except I need to know how to do that in Linux. Not windows.



Just making sure that I did say Linux. Kinda hard to get from that sentence though. I will try "Google" When I get home.

I know of no Linux distributions that enable autorun by default at all (edit, evidently I am partially wrong about this, look at the link below). And of course it would have to be a Unix-style permissioned file system with a Linux specific virus.


But once again, Google has something additional to contribute: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10544

Ok thanks. I thought of that after I posted. and i did not have time to edit. Thanks anyway though.

I think it's highly irresponsible for a Linux distributor (especially one of the most popular ones like Ubuntu) to enable auto-run by default, especially since it's been a well-known gaping hole in the Windows world ever since Microsoft added that "feature". Last time I used Gnome 2.x in Fedora, it asked what I wanted to do when I inserted a USB drive. That is the proper thing to do. I no longer use Gnome since I upgraded Fedora because it also "upgraded" to Gnome 3 (ew), and I've switched completely to XFCE, but I'd be surprised if Fedora's Gnome defaulted to auto-run.

Note that what is meant by autorun in the Linux world and in the Windows world are different things - hence why I said "partially wrong". You should actually watch the video I linked to.

I just skimmed over part of that video (but not the whole thing because it's too long for my short attention span ) and what I gleaned from it is that Linux has (or might have) bugs at various layers in the kernel, such as the USB driver or the filesystem driver, that can be exploited by a malicious thumbdrive. This is in contrast to an intentional misfeature (Windows's auto-run) that can be exploited extremely easily (all that's needed is an autorun.inf file and a binary to run). Is that a good summary?

Of course, with auto-run disabled, I'm sure there are USB and filesystem driver bugs in Windows that can be exploited as well, but auto-run is just an extremely low-hanging fruit which is enabled on most systems.