Antivirus

Alot of these "attacks" are either an overzealous Norton exaggerating false positives or something, or you're a prime target for legions of evil hackers worldwide. What do you think?

I belong to the MSE+Windows Firewall camp too. Worked well for me for many years, never paid a dime for antivirus. Of course, it pays to be careful on the internet. I was accidentally infected once but MBAM was able to take care of it without much fuss.
When a program gets so bloated that it requires you to install an uninstaller just to uninstall the program, that's where you should draw the line. I say dump Norton and use the money saved to buy more trains!

Cheerio,
Nicholas

cascaderailroad said:

Say, I get rid of Norton (which oftentimes displays a notice: An Attack By Fake Something Or Other Was Blocked ... and many other notices of Attacks On Your PC Has Been Blocked.

I really find it hard to believe that Free AVG and Free MS Security Essentials will be able to block these Attacks as well as Norton does ?

Click to expand...

First off, I assume you are savvy enough not to engage in risky browsing behavior, that's always your first defense. I can only speak from experience, but MS has never let me down. I get occasional notices that something has been blocked and the program usually takes care of it by itself. I used Norton years ago, back when it wasn't as intrusive and far reaching, and I used AVG free, which has over the years become more intrusive and resource hungry. I still believe MS Security Essentials, along with MS Safety Scanner are just as effective as any of the "big name" av programs. For a little extra protection I use Spybot S & D which has a nice Browser Immunization feature.

Give it a try.

cascaderailroad said:

Say, I get rid of Norton (which oftentimes displays a notice: An Attack By Fake Something Or Other Was Blocked ... and many other notices of Attacks On Your PC Has Been Blocked.

I really find it hard to believe that Free AVG and Free MS Security Essentials will be able to block these Attacks as well as Norton does ?

Click to expand...

Antivirus software often finds false positives and its one of the problems. I seem to recall it was AVG decided that part of Windows operating system was a virus and quarantined it, it took them about three hours to catch it on the update by that time 2-300,000 machines needed their operating systems reinstalled.

Probably better in the case of the Microsoft product. These days most (>98%) attacks come from looking at the latest Microsoft updates then working backwards to see what they have secured. Then its a race between the antivirus people and the malware writers as to who gets in first on the Pcs that haven't been updated. At least Microsoft have a head start and if you're running Microsoft updates you're ahead of the game. Talking to one of the Microsoft security heavies a year or two ago he'd only seen one bit of Malware in three years that hadn't been blocked by Microsoft updates and that one they had in the labs but were unable to find it. At three am in the morning it woke up and sent out a short message to an internet address. They'd discovered it when the Internet activity report was looked at and that server shouldn't have been transmitting. The suspicion was it was a rootkit ie the code over writes itself in such a way that the program instruction values are changed and quite difficult to spot. If you want to write an interesting bit of malware by the way some have now been found sitting on the GPU.

Of course there is always Stuxnet but that was a quite different animal and no one caught that one immediately.

Cheerio John

I'm also in the MS Essentials camp. For many years I used paid products then I tried the MS product after someone else I know recommended it. I agree it's least obtrusive and does a good job. I also run Malwarebytes (Free) and ASC malware scan periodically just to be on the safe side. So far I've been clean, or so they say.

What's interesting about the MS antivirus product is it's roots go back to the early version of the Vipre Engine by Sunbelt Software. For many years I used Vipre, or until my subscription ran out and I got the MS version. If I were to recommend a pay antivirus, I would go with Vipre as my choice. Prior to this I used Trend PC-cillin products, but I found that the Trend stuff got heavier and heavier on the system resources.

John

This is an interesting discussion. I have a pal who works for a bank call centre and he asked me to look at his laptop. When I did I found that not only did it have THREE antivirus programmes running simultaneously but it was "infected" with the SearchNu toolbar. I got of two of the AV's but I may persuade him to just have MSSE instead as I put Malwarebytes Free on.

I was going through my Yahoo E-mail and there was a "noreply@yahoo.com":Unusual traffic, complaint blah blah blah verify your E-mail address, If you do not verify your address, your Yahoo account will be disabled and blocked ... blah blah blah"

The site is unsafe and probably is a Phishing Scam ... beware what you click on

lewisner said:

This is an interesting discussion. I have a pal who works for a bank call centre and he asked me to look at his laptop. When I did I found that not only did it have THREE antivirus programmes running simultaneously but it was "infected" with the SearchNu toolbar. I got of two of the AV's but I may persuade him to just have MSSE instead as I put Malwarebytes Free on.

Click to expand...

I've always thought (or been told) that if you have more than 1 antivirus running they conflict with each other and it's worse that having none at all. I've tried various different ones over the years, and for at least the last 2 years I've used MS Essentials and Windows Firewall, along with Malwarebytes, and I've had no trouble at all.

I used Kaspersky pure 2 without problems pure 1 caused bottleneck due to compatability
Now using BitDefender on all PC's & laptops ( cheaper licence )
Both worked/working well

Dave

I recently bought a Dell Studio 1558 on Ebay "For Parts Or Not Working". After getting a BSOD I had it sort of working after an hour but it was plagued by crashes. I put a query up on the Microsoft Community and one of the stalwarts there, when I told him it had Kaspersky on it, suggested this software could cause problems and that I should try deleting it. Now to be fair I did a lot of other things such as upgrading it from 4GB to 8GB RAM and uninstalling all non-essential software, but a couple of days later it had gradually returned to full health.

cascaderailroad said:

I was going through my Yahoo E-mail and there was a "noreply@yahoo.com":Unusual traffic, complaint blah blah blah verify your E-mail address, If you do not verify your address, your Yahoo account will be disabled and blocked ... blah blah blah"

The site is unsafe and probably is a Phishing Scam ... beware what you click on

Click to expand...

You are aware that the from email address shown in Internet email is a display address and can be set to something quite different to the real sender? It's one of the basic security problems of Internet email.

Cheerio John

I use Kaspersky and I forget it is there sometimes, it works well .

Norton has been garbage since Win95. The Dos tools were good.
If you are running Win7 you have Windows Defender and the Firewall to keep you safe (Both are built-in). It looks like MS improved it for Win8. In Win8 Windows Defender replaces Security Essentials. (According to MS website.)
I have used Avast. It works well and has a gaming setting that won't interrupt you with annoying messages. Just be careful when you install it you don't install the extra garbage they want you to install with it.
Currently I rely only on the built-in Windows Defender and Firewall. And keep up on my Windows updates every couple of weeks.
I have Win7 installed on my computer.
I have been playing with computers since 1976 before PC's existed and was employed at MS for many years. I have only seen 1 real virus on any of my systems. (And that was on a utility being passed around at MS.) None of my home PC's have ever been infected. All false positives. (Not counting junk installed by DRM in some of my games.)

Steer clear of AVG Free - you get what you pay for. Once it's on your computer, it'll always leave a thread that you can't remove. It cost me a computer once. I've often thought that all of these so-called security systems designed to 'protect' your PC have been designed by virus makers. They create a virus, then sell you a system to cover it. I just use the MS system that comes with Windows and not had any problems. I usually disable it and any miscellaneous start-up programs whenever I want to drive Trainz and have great frame rates. Cheers, Roy

I invested another $23 for Norton 360 (good for 3 PC's).

Norton always asks me to uninstall the conflicting MS Security Essentals (but I pay it no mind).

I use free Microsoft Security Essentials and I do a quick scan daily with free Malware Bytes and Trend Micro's free House Call each day. If there is a hint of a problem I will do a full scan with Malware Bytes and then House Call. I update all three daily. Apparently Essentials looks over the shoulder of Malware Bytes during a scan. There was a problem that Essentials did not detect. I did a full scan with M.B. which failed to detect a problem but during that scan, Essentials found it. It seems it was watching everything M.B. was looking at and recognized a problem that M.B. thought was OK. House Call seems to be the most aggressive of these three as it has found problems not found by the others.

I use Microsoft Security Essentials on my computers. I do a quick scan every week and at the end of each month I perform a full scan. Once I am done scanning with MSE, I use Advanced System Care to help maintain the computer.

i uninstalled Microsoft security essentials because to me its the worst antivirus so i use superantispyware and avast so to me superantispywarre is the best one because it finds trojans and key gens and ms doesnt

madara123 said:

i uninstalled Microsoft security essentials because to me its the worst antivirus so i use superantispyware and avast so to me superantispywarre is the best one because it finds trojans and key gens and ms doesnt

Click to expand...

But are they really trojans and key gens? A lot of antimalware software generates false positives.

Cheerio John

The fact that it is finding keygens says to me it's false positives, unless Madara123 has been misbehaving and downloading dodgy software / keygens.

clam1952 said:

The fact that it is finding keygens says to me it's false positives, unless Madara123 has been misbehaving and downloading dodgy software / keygens.

Click to expand...

I think we ought to ask for a character reference to make sure he hasn't been misbehaving.

Cheerio John