The title of this post was the title of a San Francisco Chronicle article by Deborah Gage with today's date:

For the rest of the online article click here.

well,that's disturbing and a little annoying.

Is bleeping computer safe? On a serious note,yes,its disturbing & annoying.

Which is why I still snail mail my tax return amonst other things.

Hopefully soon enough we will all upgrade to the grid and start back at level 1. It might take at least a few weeks for spammers and malware creators to catch up... maybe...

pulling the plug is the best way to stay safe.
There is Mcafee site adviser. Works great
http://www.siteadvisor.com

there IS...provided your windows version is compatible with it

One of the many things you must do is become invisiable on the web. Use a anomyous proxy and a filter program to control all the signals that flow on the internet. Plus a good firewall that can make your ports stealth. A nice Port Blocker. Do not use ie browser. This is the basic start, and also the anti virus, adware blocker and a rootkit detection, trojan scanner/blocker. By the time you do all this, you computer may come to a crawl. So practice good security procedures. And do plenty of backups. Then you dont care if your computer gets hit. You can always restore it from the original disk and your backups.

I find that using Firefox with the NoScript addon can protect a user from a great many threats that are out there. Firefox is (in many people's opinion, including mine) a more secure browser than Internet Explorer to begin with, and the NoScript addon will prevent any website from running javascripts without your explicit permission. It also blocks Java, Flash, Silverlight, and other plugins until you give your say so. Get Firefox; Get NoScript

I'm with Amazing Andrew - Firefox with NoScript works best for me. And I'm with boopme on snail mail for tax returns. As to siteadvisor - I use it occassionally to check out a site but not solely.

I only use Firefox, and Commodo firewall, works pretty good.

I recommend adding LinkScanner to your list to check out site URLs.
While I have the PRO version, there is a free on-line scan that anyone may use as much as one wants.
http://linkscanner.explabs.com/linkscanner/default.asp

Glad you brought that up - I'll check it out.