I hope this is the right place for this question. I just picked up Sims 3 in the beginning of June after quitting the sims cold turkey for a couple of years. (I admire people who can play and still live their lives and get stuff done. I'm unfortunately not that kind of person!) For weeks, I didn't even check my email until last Friday when people on my email list told me I'd been hacked. My husband was furious because he's a software engineer and he had to wipe my computer clean and take up the weekend doing so. He believes I acquired a trojan from my sim downloads. He says to be wary of exe files.
Now I'm afraid to download anything and that's 50% of the fun of the game for me. I love the creativity of this community! The utilities are so helpful! I literally did nothing else but the sims downloads for a while so that's the only thing I've been doing that has been different recently. What are your suggestions for avoiding this in the future? I downloaded from here, GoS, the ea store, TSR and few other places. One of the only programs I've used is of Delphys helper Monkey and some other utility that I forgot the name of that helped manage package files by emptying caches and disableing packages that were in conflict. I think I got it from here as well. Please tell my what I should be wary of in the community and which sites a considered very safe. Any other tips would be appreciated!

There are no viruses on this community. Nor are their viruses on GoS, EA, TSR or other reputable sites.. the best way not to get viruses is to know where you download from and use a good antivirus like Avast! or Avira.. make sure you scan files before opening them.

Thanks for your fast response and tips. I will take your advice on scanning before I open and will try to stay with the reputable sites. I don't mean to offend, but could you tell me why you can say that this board and the other sites are safe with such certainty? I've heard even with good anti virus software some things can come in under the radar. What precautions are in place with any of the downloads on this site and others?

Most of the files here are completely safe - sims3pack, sim, and package files. They can't really contain viruses that can harm your computer. We don't allow exe files for anything but programs that really need it - things like the Dashboard, etc... made by Delphy are -always- safe. He's our site owner, a programmer by trade, and he wouldn't give you viruses. And anything else we check over to make sure it's safe. We may not necessarily virus scan every file but we require enough info that someone's not just going to be able to upload a virus and get away with it... and even the slightest hint of some problem or reports of possible viruses, we act on very quickly.

I can't speak to the precautions at other sites but I can tell you this - after being around since about 2006 in the community, staff on MTS for several years... I have -never- heard of anyone getting a virus from custom content. Sometimes random sites may have scripting issues or something that might cause a problem, but that's something you should be protecting yourself against anyway. But from custom content or modding related programs.... Never.

Just get yourself a good antivirus and tell your husband to relax.

I wouldn't suspect .package files to contain viruses because of the way they are set up but I know that there can be malware in ads and as far as I know, trojans, too. I have heard of several people who caught a trojan and they say that before this, their antivirus popped up everytime they visited tsr. since there are so many ads on there and tsr seemed not to care about their ads in other cases, people assumed they got the trojan there. They had different antiviruses and the same torjan so it might be true.

As HP said, ads and scripts on any site can contain malicious stuff. Any good anti-virus software should protect you from actually getting infected if this is the case.

It's also possible for a virus you picked up somewhere else to actually hijack the ads you see on other sites, replacing them with different ads, or more malware.

Avoid downloading illegal software, avoid watching porn on the internet, avoid turning off your firewall, avoid using local network emulators such as hamachi, avoid trusting people you meet on the internet with your computer.

You need not to be afraid of the mods on MTS, if you're really scared, read the comments before downloading anything. I rarely download anything that doesn't have at least a couple of comments stating that the program/mod works.

Make sure you have a decent anti-virus, try AVG Internet Security 9.0, it's really good, has a nice interface, the only con is that you can't port forward in the firewall and if you want to host something you usually have to turn it's firewall off (but you can still use windows firewall)

Umm.. I think I stopped making sense.
Now I'll write it in understandable english, read the comments for the file before you download it, have a decent Anti-Virus, try to identify suspicious websites before you enter them and don't read mail from senders you don't know.

There's one thing I haven't seen mentioned: If you do happen to pick up another nasty and start getting pop-ups saying a virus has been found- and the messages AREN'T from your antivirus program? Look to see if you have any new icons on your desktop. There are quite a few fake antivirus nasties out there- they'll put an icon on your desktop and cause constant pop-ups. If you see something like that/have this happen, do not turn your computer off. Turning it off will let the nasty install itself (it's already there, it will just get worse) on your computer- not only that, if you don't get every last bit it will reinstall itself. AntiVirus Plus is one I can think of- there are more but at this moment I can't recall their names.

Those usually sneak onto a system via ads - if you've seen those "456238 errors have been detected on your computer! Click here to do a free scan!" ads, ignore them, don't click 'em. They usually install fake anti-virus which opens your computer up to more nasties.