I read this morning a post on another blog site about an experiment that someone tried. They converted a PDF file to a DOC file using five different free web-based converters and found that three of the results were malware-infected.
And previously we have had issues where people have downloaded free software by carelessly searching for it on the Internet, and found versions packed with malware.
The moral of the story? Be wary of searching for tools on the Internet; there are very many useful tools out there – indeed the Internet is constructed to a very major extent from free tools – but there are also many sources of malware.