It's amazing how viruses and malware have changed.

[WinCamXP]

I just read the Malwarebytes blog post about retro viruses and malware, and I've seen quite a bit of old viruses thanks to the youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/danooct1 - and I'm shocked at how viruses have changed. Back in the DOS days, rarely did they do any actual harm, it was mostly just joke programs that just ran an animation of some sort. Or, for something like PingPong, it's easy to stop or remove. As time went on, though, it seems they were more bent on destroying the computer. In the days of Win9x, viruses went up and in your face about how your computer was screwed. You instantly knew something was wrong and regretted downloading that file. But viruses have evolved to become much worse. Now, they do one of two things. Most will hide in the internals of your computer, stealing information or robbing your computer of resources without telling you. Rarely is it blatantly obvious these malware are even there. Other malware, however, is basically a trojan, except older trojans were the in-your-face, your-computer-is-screwed attitude. Now, toolbars like MyWebSearch appear to perform a useful job or give you neat features, but in reality spyware is going on in the background. And the worst of the worst is definitely rogue programs. Rogue antivirus programs disguise as an actual antivirus, but when they run a bogus "scan", they do whatever they can to sucker you into buying them. People are very frequently fooled by these, but don't ask me how. Some are merely annoying and do no harm other than just being there, others will periodically make annoying noises and bothwer you, but the worst of the worse lock you out of every executable on the computer in a desperate attempt to get you to buy it. These can sometimes even block safe mode, which means the only way to recover your stuff is with a Linux LiveCD and a flashdrive - or some seeeeeerious hacking skills. And then, there's RAT's - those fit in programs that do absolutely nothing apparent unless the person spying on your computer tells it to do something to alert you of its presence. While I understand why the government might want to use malware, the entire idea of malware to infect consumers is horrible and just plain evil - for today's malware, at least. the original malware was either harmless or just a novelty to play with. But now? They'll screw over your computer without even telling you so you don't know a thing, or take phishing to the next level and combine it with malware. It's just horrible the things people do with computers.

I thank the Malwarebytes developers for making such an amazing program. It's outclassed any antivirus I've seen at removing malware, which is definitely something to be proud of. I'm new to these forums, and I like the looks of it here. So I'm going to end this ugly wall of text (at least it has good spelling and grammar, it could be worse!) with a friendly thank you and goodbye. So thank you, and goodbye.

[AdvancedSetup]

Thanks for stopping by.

Well there were MBR infections and 0-byte deletion infections back in the old DOS days too which was rather nasty as it made even data recovery tools fail to find the file because it was not deleted it was simply set to 0 byte size and made useless. Unless you had a backup of the file you pretty much lost the file.

Just an FYI for those that do stop by and read your post I wanted to add a little clarification.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a complementary solution to a fully installed Anti-Virus application and is not an Anti-Virus product.

Please see the following link for an explanation from one of our forum Experts.

[David H. Lipman]

Back then it was "Boot Sector infectors" such as the NYB and Form

I remember them well.