PC Security/Antivirus Software

[Ian_Coleman]

How about McAfee?

After having a number of problems with Norton, I changed to McAfee, and I have had no problems since.




Ian

 

[bendorsey]

I had Norton 360 on my old computer but my new one came with McAfee. I noticed a lot of sites rated safe by Norton were rated iffy or downright unsafe by McAfee. Had one get thru with Norton - none with McAfee (so fa_r knock on wood, lol.

Ben

 

[s_perkins]

For the last 4 years i have used Eset Nod 32 antivirus and never had anything get past it, also gives a red warning if you go to a infected sight. Stephen

 

[johnwhelan]

I'm not sure how valuable comments such as I use XYZ and haven't been infected in 25 years are.

My favourite story on Malware is a server that sent out a few packets of data across the Internet every day at 3am. It got picked up by the network monitoring tools strangely enough by a new employee who asked the question why because the address was one that wasn't normally accessed.

Every known malware scanner was run on that machine nothing showed. Eventually being a corporate machine it was sent to Microsoft's security group. They made a copy of the hard drive for interest sake and studied it for a month and found nothing. Then they reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system and it stopped transmitting.

I think the only way to evaluate this sort of software is over a large number of machines for a long period of time.

In the Windows environment as weaknesses are detected so they are patched, which is why Windows update is so important. What also is interesting is shortly after Windows is patched Malware which takes advantage of the vulnerability that has just been patched shows up as hackers reverse engineer the patches. I think I heard the comment once that Microsoft had only seen Malware attack unknown vulnerabilities twice in five years, every other attack had followed a Microsoft patch.

What exactly will be patched is kept under wraps except that internally Microsoft Security Essentials gets a small head start over the other companies anti-malware software. Just something to think about.

Cheerio John

 

[Euphod]

You make a good point John, but anecdotal evidence is all we have!

 

[johnwhelan]

You make a good point John, but anecdotal evidence is all we have!

Not quite one or two people here work or have worked in the corporate environment so have some ideas based on larger numbers.

Cheerio John