When people ask what browser or antivirus you are using beware

Hi littlefranciscan! I have always been telling anyone informations like that, I thought it is just alright because i never thought it to be otherwise. But now that you have brought it up, I think it does make sense. And i am glad i am aware of it now. Thanks to you..i think i will be more careful. Take care and have a nice day. :)

thank you for this information. i don't know much about this activity of hackers. so far, i have not encountered anyone asking me about anything on anti-virus or computer programs. if ever i encounter such things, i will be wary and cautious, as you told, to reveal anything since the information may be used against me. (sounds like a court hearing). anyway, thank you once again. i appreciate information like this.

I think most people know which browsers are popular these days. so you will be attacked anyway. but not everyone knows your PC spec and what protection you use, so these ones are the info you should keep for yourself. In my case I have many softwares because we have protection from our provider then we used to have 3 pc and some softwares don't work well in one of them so we got all different ones for it. We only have 2 now and way too many softwares. I just have to scan and clean regularly, which is something I forgot all the time

Hackers don't consult with individual users, they watch the trend. They want as many hits as possible, so they'll focus on the most popular. Norton and AVG are probably the most widely used commercial and free antivirus programs, respectively. Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser, followed by Firefox. But there are a lot of attack vectors, such as media players, e-mail clients, IMs, VoIPs, office programs, etc. These days, Internet security in and of itself is better known than it used to be. Windows usually comes with trialware versions of Norton or McAfee, and most operating systems have built-in firewalls. And security vendors are getting smarter. Cybercriminals actually make a living doing what they do. In order to perpetuate their "business," they have to step it up when the good guys step it up. There's more polymorphic code out there now (code that changes periodically to avoid signature-based detection), more iFrame malware dispensers such as MPack (planted on legitimate Web sites by way of cross-site scripting attacks, these iFrames scan visitors machines for unpatched vulnerabilities, them upload malware targeted to the vulnerabilities they find), and Storm worm, which exists on almost every network on the Internet, and installs a rootkit to avoid detection. I seriously doubt bot herders are interested in your computer specifically. They're more interested in market trends for Internet applications and Web sites. The best thing you can do is use a more proactive solution, such as IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems), sandboxing/virtualization, or a read-only kernel. Take a look at these goodies, and see if any of them appeal to you: http://www.threatfire.com/ http://www.trustware.com/ http://www.returnilvirtualsystem.com/index_files/rvspersonal.htm http://invincible-windows.blogspot.com/ Hope this helps!