For those who aren't running an anti virus app and think they're being rather clever about things, perhaps they ought to ask themselves how they know they haven't got a virus?
For those who put their faith in virus scanners which have a 1 in 3 chance of detecting an out of date virus and no chance of detecting anything recent I would like to know how they know their system is clean?
I check mine manually very regularly and I know what i'm doing, most virus' are written by a very small group of people (like almost all spam comes from the same 300 Yanks, and 30 Dutchmen) and it's fairly easy to learn the tricks that they repeatedly use, spot 1 trick like an editted win.ini and it will soon lead you to all the others.
I know the stuff that appears in my task list intimately and I check it numerous times throughout the day - usually as I make a dodgy compile and need to end task.
I spent last night removing malware and virus' from my Dad's laptop - his virus checker didn't pick any of it up, and as usual the payload involved numerous badly written software apps and not just 1 virus. None we're detected.
Then I sorted out my Dad's PC which had a very cunning virus that made it's own version of task manager and sysedit making it harder to spot - virus checker didn't pick that up either. Actually it was very well written, one of the hardest to remove that I have come across yet because it used lots of tricks I hadn't seen before - like the sysedit spoofing etc.
Give it 3 weeks and the virus which hit my Dad's PC last night will appear in the databases of 25-33% of anti virus software. The rest of you will still be vulnerable.