this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Getting drive-by zero click malware from an Adobe Flash / ActiveX embed banner ad, or JavaScript / CSS vulnerability, had nothing to do with how careful you were. You just randomly got viruses from your computer existing with an Ethernet cable connected. Antivirus were also pretty useless.
If you never got one, you were either extremely lucky, or just didn't notice and it was sneaky spyware
Those came later (late '90s-early '00s), and ran mostly on Windows; believe it or not, at that time there were people that used Linux or Mac (I dual booted, Wintendo for games, everything else on Linux).
And most malware came from shady sites. Again, if you were careful, you rarely got it (rarely, not never). If you were not careful, well, it usually was obvious because even if your Windows was not infected with a virus or trojan, your browser would be full of toolbars and the PC would run like crap.
We're talking about late 90s to early 2000's in this thread. At the end of your comment you say peak internet was 2005, so I'm getting mixed signals here. What year are we talking about again?
I'm happy for you that you were gaming on Linux back then, but it absolutely wasn't a mainstream thing. Windows dominated the market share. I knew one person with a Mac. Average users weren't using Linux.
I really think you're misremembering or blinded by rose tinted glasses, because almost every website had dodgey ads. Banner ads were basically Russian Roulette whether or not you got infected, and almost every site had them. Flash games sites, news sites, random user-hosted websites, yes porn sites, sometimes even MySpace pages, really almost every site was a risk and eventually the dice gave you malware. Unless by "being careful" you mean you stayed on Wikipedia and never actually used a web browser properly, you were getting exposed to these ads eventually.
Even the original article we're commenting on mentions this, so I'm not sure why we're all pretending that the internet was perfect back then.