Antivirus effectiveness

[Lazybones]

Well there goes my faith in AVG.. Now both AVG and AVAST have FAILED to prevent malware /virus / trojan infections on systems I installed them on, this time on my home PC.

It is clear these programs help prevent many in the wild infections however new ones can easily slip by. Going to migrate my home PC to VISTA in the hope that stronger yet annoying security controls in the OS like UAC will help prevent such infections in the future.

[Melbosa]

Yeah, the non-sense of Viruses doesn't mean your safe with any scanner now-a-days.  Read somewhere... there is a new virus created every 22.8 seconds, and a variant of a previous one every 4.7 seconds... wish I could remember where I read that though.

Either way, I don't think any virus scanner catches every virus; popular or not.  I've been hit, you've been hit, and I'm sure others here have too.  Best you can do is limit your exposure, have something in place encase and hope you stay lucky (at least in the Windows world).

Funny story, I went to a LAN in October.  I usually bring a good supply of archived internet goodies to share.  When I do finally examine any of the files, they have already been through 3 different email scanners, on 3 computes (McAfee, AVAST, Node32), and are going through a final one on my desktop (AVG); and I still got hit with a virus found after 3 months of having the file.  Only way I caught it was Spybot Registry Monitor caught the change trying to be made.

Guess you still can be caught even if you are over protected.

[Thorin]

Want the best protection?  Entomb your computer in a barrel of concrete, then drop it into one of the nuclear-waste-storage wells.

The step below that would be keeping your computer disconnected from the Internet.

The step below that would be not installing any software beyond the OS.

The step below that would be only installing software from CDs from reputable vendors.

The step below that would be installing software that may be malware but having various programs running to intercept malware (virus scanners, registry monitors, startup item checkers, etc).

The step below that would be praying and wishing, rather than installing protective software...  Which is where, unfortunately, a lot of people are at

[Mr. Analog]

Want the best protection?  Entomb your computer in a barrel of concrete, then drop it into one of the nuclear-waste-storage wells.

Science tells me that the radioactivity would realign the magnetic surfaces of the hard drive platters, and so there would be a lot of damage caused with this procedure.

SCIENCE! (1940s/50s pulp Sci-Fi style, that is) tells me the computer would come back super-sized, vastly intelligent, self-aware and malicious.

Anime Science tells me that it would stay intact for a few hundred years before children with chromatic hair require its safely locked-away music data to defeat an invading alien fleet.

The best solution might be to move your important data to a remote host and let them worry about file corruption/viruses. Then just use an in-memory version of your OS of choice (like say, putting the latest Ubuntu ROM on a thumb drive). Sure it's slower, but hey, you don't need to worry about infection if your OS never actually "writes" anything, am I right?

[Darren Dirt]

Yeesh! Reading the above 2 posts makes me wish for a simpler time, a la "Obsoletely Fabulous"

[Mr. Analog]

Yeesh! Reading the above 2 posts makes me wish for a simpler time, a la "Obsoletely Fabulous"

WHAT!?

*click-click*

WHAT!?

[Thorin]

ROFL!

Futurama FTW!

[Darren Dirt]

ROFL!

Futurama FTW!

relive the fun thru just the words (curse you timesink, now I wish hadn't found that site )

[Mags]

MaximumPC's latest anti-virus roundup:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/protect_your_pc_from_guys_like_this

[Mr. Analog]

So what's the verdict?

[Lazybones]

So what's the verdict?

Free antivirus sucks (Avast / AVG) unless you want to put up with ads (Antivir).
Alternatively pay for NOD 32 and you are fairly safe.

[Tom]

It doesn't help that AVG's free mirrors are always dog slow for me (20+ minutes to download a 200kb virus db? I don't think so), and that they hold back all the new stuff for paying customers. The free servers don't get everything right away.

[Mags]

What I was surprised by was that Norton seems to be back on top. I had totally written them off, but seems they went back to the drawing board and really got their @%&# together again... for now at least.

And yes for free Avira is tops, but you get pop-ups. They really hammered AVG for being a bloated pig.

[Thorin]

Free antivirus sucks (Avast / AVG) unless you want to put up with ads (Antivir).

And yes for free Avira is tops, but you get pop-ups. They really hammered AVG for being a bloated pig.

Those upgrade pop-ups are annoying, and are appearing daily on my machines.  To stop that, I set the access list on the executable that shows the pop-up, called avnotify.exe.  Here's what I did:

1. Open a command window
2. Navigate to the location of avnotify.exe (on my computer, it was at C:\Program Files\Avira\Antivir Desktop)
3. Type cacls avnotify.exe /e /d Everyone
4. Laugh out loud thinking about how easy that was
5. Realize it won't be considered "tested" until tomorrow at this time
6. Decide not to tell wifey until tomorrow at this time that I've solved those annoying upgrade ads
7. Go look for beer
8. Forget what I was doing, but just click Post anyway

[Lazybones]

I use security essentials from ms now on my home systems to avoid that problem..

But that is a great fix