Antivirus

[Bart Silverstrim]

Michael "TheZorch" Haney wrote:
> Bart Silverstrim wrote:
>> Because AV isn't a silver bullet. It's reactive, not proactive; there's 
>> always a window of time open when a virus is created/modified/altered, 
>> released, discovered, reverse engineered, a signature is created, then 
>> released by the vendor, then your update time has to come up to get the 
>> signature, and hopefully you weren't infected by then.
>>   
> That's why I really like Avast for my Windows installations.  Its 
> updated several times a weeks and sometimes several times a day 
> automatically.  In fact on Saturday it updated twice in the same day 
> automatically.

I can set my AV to update every half hour. Doesn't mean the signatures 
are all that up-to-date, though. But if it gives you the warm fuzzies...

>> And since AV's don't normally get along with each other, you can't run 
>> multiple engines to overlap protection.
>>   
> This is true.  If you run Vista and install another anti-virus program 
> turn off Windows Defender and absolutely do not EVER try to run Norton 
> Anti-Virus and McAfee at the same time ... bad things happen.

You should reword that "If you run Vista and install another program..."

>> And of course there's overhead in your AV's running, since they look at 
>> all execution of files, along with the scheduled checks.
>>   
> I did some research and found that Avast has the lowest impact on your 
> system resources.  

It's still there, though.

I'm not a gamer user, I'm not a performance nut, but I do find it 
irritating in principal (principle? Too lazy to look it up at the 
moment) to be coerced into running something that impacts my system's 
memory and CPU usage just because the OS is crap.

That said I still run an AV on my one Windows system that is used solely 
for supporting my iPod via iTunes.

>Norton Anti-Virus has the highest system resource 
> impact, and McAfee ... well its a P.O.S. in my humble opinion.

The whole AV reactive model is a POS. :-)

<AV's crapping out snipped>
> I can honestly say I've had absolutely none of these problems with Avast 
> at all.  I used to use AVG for Windows but had update problems.  I tried 
> Avast and never looked back.  I once had McAfee ... then uninstalled it 
> after about a week.

If I weren't working on supporting about a thousand systems in seven 
buildings, or had a couple years working support for an ISP, I could 
probably say I didn't have problems either, or a DOA part from a vendor. 
It's an odds game. As it is, in the trenches admins are on the front 
line to exposure to these issues. AVG I've had no trouble with, but I 
run it on family systems, not in a corporate rollout. McAfee I got 
reports of secondhand enough that I avoid it. It's a travesty I heard 
the number of reports I did for a paid-for subscription service. AVG for 
home use is free...haven't had bad reports, and if I did, as long as 
there weren't many I'd chalk it up to "pay a vendor for support, it 
works for me".

>> But hey, it's status quo using a broken system model and these companies 
>> profit from it, and it's another requirement when you're dealing with 
>> the alternative of making users care enough to learn how to use a broken 
>> system properly. Otherwise you have to wait until a system comes along 
>> properly built to protect users from themselves.
> I love how Avast can be setup to not only automatically download and 
> install virus database updates but it can also be configured to 
> automatically download and install updates to the application itself.  
> The free home edition is basically fully automated as respect to 
> maintenance.  You do have to turn on the option to automatically update 
> the application, otherwise you'll be prompted to download an updated 
> copy manually.  What I like about it the most is that Avast is also a 
> malware scanner as well as a an anti-virus program. 

Yeah, there's an anti-malware tool from grisoft too.

I'm not speaking from recently googles myself but I'm sure there are 
examples of "tests" from different sites that would rank Avast in 
differently depending on the competition, time of year, test 
environment, phase of the moon, etc. regarding effectiveness.

I still stand by my point that the entire AV/Anti-spyware/Anti-malware 
industry is profiting from the broken architecture of Windows.