free antivirus = virus.... antivirus = virus.... brwoser addons = virus... spyware = virus... malware = virus... free anything on the net = virus
i have not used antivirus in years and never get viruses. of course i dont download garbage and dont let other people use my comp and em capable of detecting and dismantling viruses without the help of a antivirus.
FireFox = uber elite, IE = newb user junk...
just be mindful of the fact that some websites just flat out do not support firefox period. few and far between though. infact only two come to mind...
as for where they get your email from... this is all much bigger then you think. The people responsible were running international scams long before wow came along. Wow just became a great target. so there are a few possibility on how the info was obtained. It did seem to get real bad when bliz switched to the battlenet account stuff. If they were hacked or have a security leak it is in battlenet. More then likely i would say though somewhere you used the email, or it maybe even more complex considering who may be behind it... like they are monitoring email sites for traffic... everyone who went and signed up for battlenet got a bunch of emails when they did especially those of us after lil pets. What may have gone on is they saw the traffic into certain email accounts and knew then that you were a wow player or at lest that you had a battle net account since im actually getting these emails for a few games i dont nor ever had played. and getting them for almost all the ones i have.
So the leak would not really be bliz's fault or problem. Another thought is that the info was sold by one place or the other... i wont point fingers and i doubt seriously bliz had anything to do with any of it. our free emails get paid for somehow.... the best way to support free email is to sell those email address to advertisers.
many of the letters grammar, frequency and other things match up a lot with 419 emails i get all the time. The whole thing would seem to be a sideshow of the 419 scams. Most likely run by the same entity. again i wont point any fingers to who that is here but... yea. The entitys behind the 419 scams do have the finances and power to do things mentioned above and fits together nicely... to bad the fbi refuses to do anything about it....
google 419 scam.
edit -- OOO or you could take my route... wreck your credit, go in the whole way over your head, get in trouble with the law. Then no one wants to steal your info, infact i put my info everywhere in the hopes someone will steal it so i can blame everything on them MUHAHAHA
One last thing, GET A BLIZ AUTHENTICATOR!!! its the best protection you can have. for wow anyway... lol for other things try LifeLock? or for other things try Trojan i hear there in the protection business
hehe