Two months ago I was writing about how my mother’s old computer is too old to have virus protection installed. I’m happy to say that now she has a new laptop with AVG free installed and everything is safe and running smoothly. Fortunately there were no problems in the meantime and there we no viruses trying to attack her computer.

But. At the end of April I witnessed first-hand how dangerous this behaviour can actually be.

There was a Royal Wedding in England, I’m sure you were watching it, and my wife got pretty excited. We watched the ceremony and afterwards she went online to check for photos and other important details she missed during the TV coverage.

I went out and when I returned home she was rather scared that there is a virus on her computer. I checked it and her laptop really was infected. Her free virus protection identified it and offered to delete the infected files. Fortunately there were no problems, AVG free took care of everything and she didn’t lose any data or have any other troubles. But if this happened on my mother’s old computer, with no free virus protection installed – well, that would have been another story.

The way she got infected was really simple – she was surfing for wedding photos and arrived to some malicious website, where a pop-up advertisement opened. It was styled as the Windows Explorer in Windows 7 with red text saying her hard drive is infected and she should click here to clean her computer. She got scared, actually clicked the link and that was it. (I didn’t remember at the time to create the actual screenshot, but it was similar to this one here).

I hope this little real-life story can demonstrate the importance of having free virus protection installed on your computer – and also to keep it regularly updated. If you neglect basic security, you have a good chance to get in trouble.