I was tired of being held hostage by the image hosting sites. So, I started hosting my own with my blog.
I created a tutorial blog to aid ladies to do it themselves vs having to deal with shady hosting sites that allow nudity or suffer with an label from the hosting site smearing your photo.
Maybe this could help the ladies that are not on the PO board.
http://hostyourownimages.blogspot.com/

Your favorite helpful gal,
SG

Not by a lady though so don't get your underwear in a bunch! Ha!! But important just the same since it happened right after clicking on the link in whitney's ad this week.  Again, I am NOT blaming whitney but rather think the site she hosted her pic on must have gotten infected with a virus and then my computer became infected when I went to the site after clicking on the link.

She herself later posted that she couldn't get back on her hosting site.  Anyway, I had clicked on the link and within 20 seconds my computer was popping up with all sorts of warnings of malware, viruses and trojans.  Norton popped up saying it caught 2 only.  Something else popped up repeatedly saying I had 26 of them.  The kind that steal your bank info, send out emails to everyone in your contact lists, etc.  And,  I was pushed to purchase a firewall called "Smart Internet Protection 2011".  I tried to ignore it and ignore it.  Everytime I x'd out of it, it popped up again and started flashing how many viruses, how many were trojans, how many were attacking my email, etc etc.  I thought it strange that Norton would not catch them but there are so many new viruses every day, I thought maybe it was possible that it didn't.  So, I am embarrassed to say.  I finally caved in and purchased 6 months worth of this smart internet protection 2011 for just over $50 after tax.    I downloaded the program and it quaranteed all 26 viruses.   Yay!!

Tonight,  when I rebooted my computer, the program "Smart Internet Protection 2011"  that saved my computer has completely disappeared from my computer.  Gone.  The only thing left are dead shortcuts.   So, I googled it."      Turns out "smart Internet Protection 2011" is the virus/malware.  Initially, it is the only malware but if you do not remove it right away, your computer will become bogged down with pop ups and additional viruses to the point of crashing!  

So, here is a link with more info about this malware and how to get rid of it.  And, do not click on that darn link!!!  Perhaps, Puck could remove it from whitney's thread since it is too late for her to edit it herself?    It would save people headaches and possibly money.    I called the toll free number on my "receipt" and of course it is just dead air and then goes dead.  Total scam.   I paid with a vanilla visa so at least I know they cannot keep charging and stealing my money in the future.  I just won't use that card again for anything else.

End of PSA and back to your regularly scheduled extracurricular activities.

I've had that "virus alert" as well.  It installs a root command to restore the virus file if it has been deleted when the computer is re-booted.  Here's how to get rid of it.

Get a program called "Clean up" and another program called Malwarebytes Anti-malware.  There are free versions of both out on the interwebs.

1.  Run Clean up.  This cleans up temp files, delected files, etc.
2.  Right click on "My Computer" on your desktop. Select "properties" then go to the "System Restore" tab.
3.  Turn off system restore.
4.  Reboot your computer in safe mode with networking (press F8 when it starts booting up).
5.  Run Malwarebytes.  Remember to download the latest virus definitions.
6.  Reboot computer.  Go back to "My Computer / Properties / System Restore" and turn system restore back on.

That should do it every time.

Sorry to hear about that.  My recommendation is to use Firefox and Adblock plus Addon (http://adblockplus.org/en/installation).  The virus you got was from the banner ads from a website.  The addon blocks any banners in the site.

Also, once you get infected, this is the only tool that can remove these fake antiviruses.
http://malwarebytes.org/

Cheers,
Yeti

These people try to make it appear as though you have a problem and then tell you they have just the product to fix it when of course it won't and they are the source of the problem to begin with.

It's really important to use good security software on your machine and don't click on links unless you are sure where they come from.  I use Norton Internet Security and have it check everything.  So far, so good; it warns me whenever anything looks suspicious and has caught the few things that got through swiftly.

Same thing happened to me two years ago from a celebrity site. I had Norton and the virus got right through it like it was swiss cheese.

One of the worst things a Windows user can do is to always log on as a user with administrator rights. The first thing to do to protect yourself is to create a normal user account with limited rights, and log on as that user unless you are installing hardware or software. The limited user account does not have sufficient rights to modify the system registry. Even if you came across a booby trapped website or a virus infested email, the damage will be very limited. You can always log off and log on as an administrator and undo the damages by running msconfig to suppress the auto-launch spyware and disable virus related services which probably could not install anyway because of the limited rights of the account.

Macs are a lot safer, not only because there are fewer spyware and viruses targeting MAC OSX, but also because Macs require the user to confirm operations which may potentially be dangerous. Windows 7 does that in a way that encourages users to just answer yes so the safety measure is more or less useless.

In your case when the malware kept asking you to install more crap, the best thing to do is to bring up the Task Manager and kill all Internet Explorer session with brute force. Your system was still okay up to that point. Whatever Malware you might have installed could easily be removed using Msconfig. Once you willing clicked on installing the fake virus scanner (probably as an administrator, no less!), your windows was FUBAR.

Norton is mainly for consumers. Symantec also sells Endpoint Protection which is geared for businesses. It does not expire every year like its less expensive Norton branded products. EPP also has less overhead and uses less system resources.

I am using Webroot and it has saved my ass on occasion.

This does happen, if you ever get one of these things never pay for the internet protection they are a scam and useless. As far as AV, all are useless they pickup the major way out there stuff but the sneaky stuff is ignored, that's why I don't pay for them and just use Windows Security Essentials which is free and it does the same job. Just be careful what you click and if you can set stricter policies in your UAC so you don't have admin privileges on your account that's better. Its annoying but its the safest way to browse. Personally if something like that happens I just format and restart, I dont keep any personal info on my PC so its easy to cut ties and start over.