Are malware spreaders getting more agressive?

[Archae]

In the past few months, I've had 2 attacks with "scareware" that took over my computer, and had to be erased with system restores, and my anti-virus and anti-adware programs have caught several adwares and malwares.
Just had one cauhgt 5 minutes ago called "MEH.EXE"

All from ads at legit (no porn) web sites.

Is it just me, or are the malware makers getting more agressive?

[dembotoz]

1. they just keep getting better at what they do

[cthulu2016]

2. Yes, they are. And this may be heresey, but the free MS

Yes, they are. And this may be heresey, but the free Microsoft Security Essentials thing has caught several of them in real time that were missed by other resident programs like spybot. (In particular, it reliably blocks some very troublesome "fix your computer" scams that take over your computer.)

Not saying the MS product is all one needs, but that it seems to be a valuable addition to the (free) toolkit.

[Union Scribe]

4. I have Security Essentials

and I've also found it generally reliable. But I did return to my computer a couple days ago with a fake "Windows 7 Security" program that was especially aggressive and blocked "for security reasons" all my browsers and I had to DL some specialty tools from Bleeping Computer on my laptop to get rid of it. Thank goodness for system restore, too.

Edit to add: fwiw I was on The Chive site, which seems to be a haven for malware ads.

[cthulu2016]

5. A lot of those set themselves up as

an exe file in the administrator or user folder in "Documents and Settings" with a random number name.

Like 3746577756.exe.

I've found and hand deleted one or two of them that all my security programs missed.

[Blacksheep214]

3. Stick to Packers dot Com! nm