What do teenagers do to get so much malware on computers?

Question

Malware removal is my primary income source, but I've never taken the time to research why teenagers are the most dangerous thing to Microsoft Windows today. It seems that they download and install everything that ever pops up, along with looking for free stuff and surfing the most risky sites of all. I want to know the details.

Answer 1

In my humble opinion, it goes much deeper than just "free stuff and porn". First of all, 'porn" is a $50 billion a year industry on the Net. Why would anybody intentionally put malicious code on a site that is used to generate that kind of revenue? Seems ludicrous to me. I believe this goes to the psyche of the American teenager. Other countries may do the same, but we are talking about OUR kids here. It's much easier to form a "relationship" with someone your own age online, rather than do it face to face in your community or school. The fear of rejection, ridicule, etc., and the ease of acceptance of those who would be a social pariah, in their eyes, is too great a chance to pass up. Kids want to feel important, special, accepted for who they are, and feel that if they have a huge number of online friends they are "popular". If a kid doesn't get validation at home, he will look other places, and what better place to get validation than in an online community with literally millions of potential "friends". Couple this with the attitude that my "friends" would never do anything to hurt me, and that goes for my online friends as well, I will download anything they send me or suggest to me. After all, if you can't trust your friends, who can you trust? It disturbs me greatly to see so many kids posting questions here wanting to defeat their school's security on the computer system in the school. They would rather seek validation of themselves in the eyes of their peers than get an education, even at the expense of severe punishment if they get caught using a proxie to circumvent the security measures in place. What are the parents doing to their kids to make them risk an "illegal" (in the eyes of the school) relationship with on line "friends" and not seek the same from their parents and siblings? Are we raising an entire generation of socially cyber-misfits? Just my 2 cents worth..................

Answer 2

IMO there are two types of sites that harbor the majority of malware, spyware and virus software. They are porn and gaming sites. Not necessarily sites with games but sites that cater to gamers with hints, tips and cheats on games. I think you will find many in this community are the hacker type and many of them find it challenging to destroy others property. As for porn, I think that is self explanatory.

I once answered a question on here about what I would like to invent. As I told the lady I would love to have a virus of my own that sought out those who generate this crap and destroyed (physically as in smoke) all their hardware.

I was a part of the high tech field until I retired with the last few years doing for the government much of what you do. It is disgusting how much time and effort must be spent to neutralize what is essentially vandalism.

Answer 3

You said it yourself. Free stuff, and game/software crackz. As I'm sure your aware, sites with this info are loaded with malware and teens aren't paying the bill to fix the PC, that is the parents privilege!

Answer 4

The things you listed are the same things that I thought of. They spend a lot of time online clicking on everything. I think a lot of adults won't click on random links to strange websites, but teenagers will just keep clicking and downloading.

Answer 5

One they don't think anything back will happen from downloading free music, movies, games, you name it. They think that becasue it's free, they wont get any extra hidden things, when infact they do. Just by downloading music from limewire you could be downloading a virus to your computer.

Answer 6

Porn sites are notorious for that. They are just awful.