Before I start, I know that Mac’s are not completely immune to the problem, but they are certainly a lot more secure. I’ve just spent more time than I had to spare disinfecting, checking and repairing all my Windows computers and connected network shares after I discovered that a virus had got in. It had managed to attach itself to the computer that I use only as a downloader – and therefore expect it to get hit by virus nastiness – but unfortunately the virus had got around all the defences I had in place. It was a variant of the Poebot virus that spreads itself across network connections. Whilst doing all this, I also found another nasty piece of spyware – Live which had distributed itself all over the registry.
I’ve now hopefully closed up the holes that allowed these little nasties in, but it’s been time consuming running virus and spyware scans on all network drives and so on to see just how far it spread itself.