Online polls, weblinks and Spyware

[Seabiscuit]

I've been away for almost a week because my computer became infected with Spyware (which attacked and partly disabled my Norton Professional anti-spam/anti-virus system) and caused constant popup messages preventing me from accessing my documents and accessing the internet.

I first noticed it after clicking on a link posted in a thread on DU about some poll, without carefully reading all the comments in the thread (e.g. later I noticed a comment about "what poll"?) - the link took me to what appeared to be an E-Bay page and there was a political question and to participate you first had to write something in a box, then click on an icon to proceed. That took me to a page that required me to type in my e-mail address for my response to be processed. Without thinking I did so, and clicked another icon to move on. That took me to a third page asking me for credit card information. Then and only then the red lights went on in my head and I exited the site. I checked the post that contained the link and noticed there was nothing recognizable in the link, and no reference to E-Bay. I suspect the entire website was set up by a hacker for some company attacking computers with Spyware. The next day my computer was infected with the Spyware garbage.

Just got it repaired at home thru some technicians that eliminated a very insideous virus from my computer a year ago.

I'm curious if anyone else here experienced this same problem during the past week.

Meanwhile, I'm not clicking on any more links on DU, be it online polls, articles, whatever. As we all know, DU is routinely infected with freepers visiting with the sole intent of causing trouble for us "libruls". I wouldn't be surprised if one of them was behind the trap I fell into.