Avoid getting Hacked

I'm talking about home machines or small office machines.  Big company setups, like Sony, are a whole different kettle of fish.  But for us home users, there are some simple things that will improve your odds.
1.  Turn the machine off when not in use.  It cannot catch a virus off the internet if it is powered down. 
2.  Never, ever, click on an email attachment.  No matter who the email is from.  Your best friend may have been infected by a virus, and virii, will use the address book in the infected machine to email themselves far and wide.  Attachments can contain malicious code that executes as soon as you click.  If you just have to see what is in the attachment, save it to disk, and inspect it with a low speed text editor, like notepad, or wordpad.  Word itself contains a powerful BASIC interpreter that can do all kinds of damage when presented with malicious code in an attachment.
3. Run a virus scanner now and then.  There are a lot of 'em.  Avast is good, and so is malwarebytes.
4. Run Windows Task Manager now and then.  Check the "process" window.  Processes are programs running on your machine.  There should not be more than 30 processes running.  Check out strange processes, or processes that seem to be taking up too much CPU time or ram.  Click on the CPU or Memory Usage columns and Task manager will rearrange the display with greatest CPU or Memory Usage at the top.  Google on the names of ramhogs or CPU hogs to find out what they are.  When you get a solid ID, such as "well known virus" go after  it.  Find it on disk and zap it.  Find any references in the registry with Regedit, and zap them. 
5.  Music download sites are virus infected. 
Good luck.

Rootkit.bout.cidox.b

Nasty virus.  Lovable daughter, who is up for Christmas, was web surfing on my machine. One website she surfed thru infected my trusty Compaq 1750 NX
.  It's nasty.  It slows down the boot, slows down loading programs, slows down the internet, freezes the mouse, and crashes the whole machine erratically. 
   It's a rootkit, which means it hacks out a piece of hard disk to live on that is not part of the Windows file system.  This means that Windows, and Windows tools like Explorer cannot even see it on disk, even if you knew where to look. 
   I tried Anti Malware Bytes (that crashed before it finished) Spybot Search and Destroy, Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool,  and Regclean without any luck.  But Kaspersky's TDSSKiller nailed it, or at least crippled it a lot.  Trusty Compaq is now running mostly normal, although there are moments of sluggishness that make me think the damn thing is still active. 
   Damn Microsoft for making Windows so vulnerable.  Damn virus writers.  Writing a virus ought to be a felony punishable by stoning to death in the public square.