Need some advice concerning malware infections.

Hello MG users,

I have used your site for many years now, following your guides for malware, virus and spyware protection, as well as adapting safe browsing habits. I treat every website as a potential malware carrier, so I double check before opening any site. I have Avast antivirus, comodo firewall, malwarebytes, ccleaner and the McAffee siteadvisor add on for firefox.

I use my computer only for gaming purposes and browsing a couple of "safe" sites such as youtube and ebay. I rarely to never open any sites on this computer that I am not familiar with, however, despite my actions, a few days ago I managed to get infected with malware. Firefox kept randomly opening with pop ups of all sorts of sites without me opening the program. I ran Avast, but it didn't pick anything up, nor did I receive any alerts from comodo. Malware bytes on the other hand found 3 infections. I've had some bad experiences with stubborn regenerating malware in the past, so my course of action was to back up all my important files, format my hard drive and fully reinstall windows and all programs.

It had me wondering how my pc got infected in the first place. Does anybody know what ways of getting infected other than visiting faulty infected sites? Can malware infections spread from other pcs logged into the internet network? I'm not the only person using this network.

Also, what else can I do to make my computer safe from malware attacks in the future? (Re-downloading games every reinstall is far too time consuming.) I am considering to use a sandbox for browsing, but I'm uncertain if sandboxing the browser can effectively stop malware.

I hope anyone has some tips for the future!

Sdn

 

Hello,

thank you for your reply! I never put any USB or external hard drives into this pc except for 1 back-up drive that has a few driver programs on it for WLAN that I only insert after a reinstall. I made sure the drive is clean before I started using it as a back up though (it was a new USB stick, but I format + shredded the drive before use). I only insert it nowadays after a clean install to make sure it does not get infected. I scan it after each reinstall just in case. I've had some hidden malware in the past that spread through USB, so I do not want that to happen again.

File sharing is turned off, so I suppose that reduces the infection risk through the network. I also set my pc to treat the network as a public network for added security.

Concerning google, its funny you say so, it happened so many times in the past that I clicked on a "safe" site and comodo/avast starts screaming, despite mcaffee showing the site with a "McAffee secure" logo. So I rarely to never open any site from google anymore unless I really have to (like the avast homepage, iobit, etc.).

Your advice to create an image of the install is great though. I think I'll do that, it would save a lot of time.

I've done some research where my latest infection came from, and it turned out a program I downloaded from softonic was infected. I won't be downloading from that site again.