If you’re running a Windows XP operating system and for some reason, you’re still not running an Anti-virus software and anti-malware software, then you are probably infected.

if you really want to get scared, look at the Shadowserver Foundation, they are a group of security professional monitoring the web to estimate the number of owned PC’s that are acting as Bots for bad people. This is a scary statistics, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of PC’s, the majority of them used without the user even noticing that he’s compromised.

This is sad because clearly, no true Microsoft program would be identified as a Trojan virus, so this should be removed from your PC immediately.

If you want to stay out of the statistics or if you want to know if you’re infected, you don’t have to pay the big bucks, just a little know-how and a about an hour of your time and you should be able to clean up any virus or malware from your machine.

My personal recommendation, invest the money, pay a reasonable price to get a good anti-virus and anti-malware program. There are a bunch of signature-based program on the market today, usually bundled with a good firewall and anti-malware program. I’m not saying the Microsoft Firewall is bad but an all-in-one security suite is usually better, less processing cycles, less overhead and less chances of program conflicts.

Take the time to look it up, look at reviews, if you can, get a hold of the 2008 Gartner Endpoint Security magic quadrant (this one is from 2006) or look for software reviews.

My top three picks for paid yearly subscription: McAfee, CA, Kaspersky.

The acceptable free ones: AVG and Avast

For free anti-malware, if you’re already infected, it’s not too late, a lot of these sites will ofer online scanning for free (CA does a pretty good job of this). If you’re clean or if you know for a fact that you have a healthy MAC or PC, you should either use the paid and more robust Internet security suite from one of the vendors mentioned above or try one of the free ones.

Free anti-malware: Microsoft (Windows Defender), Malware bytes

So, take the time, take action and clean up after yourself

I’ve been doing this for close to 18 years now and it really irritates me when someone sends me an E-mail that talks about a new phishing scam warning, a supposedly legitimate security alert coming from his best buddy or a chain letter asking for help with someone in Siberia and that the person who sent me the original email thinks that he or she is the first one in the world to send me this.

It would take that person 5-10 minutes maximum to go on the web and look on any search engine or myth buster site to see if there is any truth to this, it would save some very valuable electrons and it would make everyone on his or her mailing list a lot safer.

I’ve seen friends, family members and co-workers get infected because they clicked on links they were not suppose to, just because it came from a trusted source.

My advice to everyone out there that every received it, please take that 5 minutes and look it up!

I searched for a good 30 seconds on Google and found numerous site that helps decipher the truth from the hoaxes, one of the good one out there, VMyth: http://vmyths.com/