First, let me dispell any misapprehension you might have regarding this post: it is not about condoms.
Now that I have that out of the way, what *is* this post about? Yesterday I was checking out other blogs by doing some searches on Technorati. One of the ones I clicked on caused my virus checker to throw a fit. Apparently, the site I was going to redirected me to http://please click run to remove virus .c4tdownload.com/click_run_to_remove_virus.exe. Firstly, I thought I was going to a blog, not a software install, and secondly, the “virus remover” was actually a trojan (Win32:Trojan-gen. {Other}).
Now…since it was an exe, I wouldn’t have downloaded it anyway…although I suppose it might have been exploiting something in Internet Explorer to install itself without asking. But this is maybe only the second time in 10 years on the Internet that I’ve run into an actual trojan that whatever antivirus program I was running caught.
I guess this is a good indicator of the value of “active” anti-virus scanning. Before I even had the chance to click on “Yes/No” for the download, my AV program had detected the threat. The more interesting thing to me is how high I jump at one in the morning when a big virus warning pops up and my AV program plays its alarm and shouts out (Avast “talks”) saying “WARNING: VIRUS DETECTED!!”