Re: Antivirus

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.
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.
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. Norton Anti-Virus has the highest system resource
impact, and McAfee ... well its a P.O.S. in my humble opinion.
And you are at the whims of what the AV vendor defines as a threat. This
was rehashed on Clam's mailing list, since ClamAV isn't really an AV
anymore as much as it is a malware scanner targeted for mail servers;
the team was including signatures for spoofing and phishing sites in the
signatures to scan for. To be fair every AV vendor pulls this now, as
all sorts of cookies and javascript crap pops up as a "virus" or threat.

This is all assuming that the AV will work properly. I've had a number
of times where either the AV product implodes (Vexira liked to get stuck
with some updates not working properly, or we find a system that needs
to have the site license key updated and until then it annoys the user
with a stuck command prompt going haywire until we reinstall) or
interferes with other products (McAfee screwing up email). The only one
I haven't had a headache with of some sort has been AVG. But that
doesn't solve the other problems mentioned.

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.
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.

--
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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