Just a warningFollow

I seem to have had the same thing happen. I haven't been to any sites that I don't normally visit and the last site visited was Blizzards own. All of the sites I frequent are legit businesses that I've been dealing with for two years or more without problem. Unlike you I'm ticked off. I've now had my account suspended twice within 12 hours and the last time I was on I sent one message on the guild channel. I've now been forced to change my password twice in one day without any sign of why other than the same note you got. It would be nice if they'd include a section of the log showing the spam so you could verify the offence.

This is why getting the authenticator is a good thing too. I knew about the Ad hacks from my FF11 days. Even though you may run Firefox with the plugins you never can tell when some script kiddie could find some way to get through the awesomeness that is Firefox.

Some people may see the authenticator as a scam or useless, I see it as a deadbolt. Sure a normal lock on a door works just fine, but wouldn't you feel that much safer by having that deadbolt put in?

OK, grandpa, it seems that you have trouble understanding the issue, considering your responses in this and the other server.
It is not the site that has the malicious software on it. Reuters.com and blizzard.com aren't going to put a malicious program on their front page intentionally. They do, however, pay advertising sites for those little banner ads you see (I am just, at this point, going to assume that you two 'safe' people that have been hacked run Internet Explorer, or Mozilla with no security add-ons).
A malicious piece of software can be installed in a fly-by scenario, in which the software uses Flash and Java hooks to install as soon as the banner is 'viewed' by a computer. See, the computer has to load the information out of the banner to display it. All it needs to do is put a redirect sequence on, directing the computer to silently download, or even visit, any website it wants you to (the image for the 'banner' is stored on a computer SOMEWHERE, and your computer has to connect to that computer to get the image data).

THIS is how you 'safe' people get 'hacked.' It isn't a scheme, it isn't a plot. It's just you not being as safe as you think you are with your computers.

Following this up with one of those 'awesome' anti-virus suites like AVG (R.I.P good AVG), Norton, or McAaffe (I can list more you shouldn't use but the list would be too big), will solve nothing. Those things are designed to detect a minor disturbance once every few months, and then charge you again for a license update. No bueno.

I'm going to have to disagree. My 1st computer used McAfee and it missed a virus that resulted in us having to reformat the hard drive (course that was a decade ago). In addition my high school used McAfee on its computer system, turns out it had missed over 50 different viruses(that was 7 years ago). While I don't know if it has improved since then, I'd not risk it.

Norton I stopped using for 2 reasons, it started becoming a major resource hog and there was a bug where it didn't like Blackwing Lair. I've not used it since so I couldn't tell you how it is nowadays.

If you look at a database update on Norton, it's usually around a 100-300MB file with less than 50 updates. A similar update in McAffee contains less than 100. A similar (these were all downloaded the same week) update on Avast contained an, in comparison, staggering 402 definitions added or updated.

As someone who used to sell homebuilt computers, I used to do a test (this was around a year ago). I'd get four rigs, one with Kaspersky, one with Norton 360, one with McAffee, and one with Avast. I had a file I had downloaded previously from dubious sources that had a rather well known and old piece of nastyware. I opened the executable on all 4 machines, and only two picked up the (Extremely old, I must stress) virus. They were not the ones with the commercial software.

McAffee may have indeed started out as a great company, but so did AVG. When I do a checkup on a friend or customer's computer, McAffee fails to pick up around 30% of the crap on hard drives, whereas Norton's 'success' rate is closer to 60% malware missed. This is NOT acceptable.

Of course, to be fair, AVG missed around 30%, the same as McAffee, and Avast misses around 5% of the malware that Lavasoft, AVG, or Spybot pick up. All of those free programs have around the same failure to detect rate, but they seem very good at picking up what the others missed.
In all of my tests in recent times, McAffee did pick up a total of 3 'potential malicious software' hits which my free programs did NOT, though 2 were false alarms. The one it caught, though, was a Trojan, for what it's worth.

In short, I believe the free programs have better detection rates because they have extremely competent Heurustic (sp) coding, which is what allows an Anti-ware program to detect virii that aren't in it's definition base. McAffee, Norton, and Kaspersky would lose too much money putting a good hereustics code in, as less people would see the need to renew their license every year.

*edit* Sorry Jay, thought you had directed that towards me.

Horse:Thanks for the suggestion but that has already been done :)

Edited, Dec 20th 2009 11:15am by rehevark