Anti virus software recommendations please

[Manonabike]

I'm a Norton fan and find it works well, it may slow down the computer a little bit but I feel safe using it after being let down with some of the others!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Some years ago I was asking myself the same question until a friend suggested a hackers forum was the place to find answers, not sure if these forums exist anymore though . Well, after a few weeks reading and asking questions the conclusion was simple. Norton was the easiest AV to bypass and Kaspersky was the hardest, at least for backdoors viruses. This was bad news for me cos I had been running Norton AV for years and I still had about 3 months left on my licence. The experience in these forums was very valuable indeed, I knew exactly what to look for and where to look for signs of viruses, etc. Over a few months I put to the test my newly found information I kept my Norton in my PC and I purchased Kaspersky for my laptop. The Karpersky interface, at the time, was not very good but I got used to it. The next step was to wait for one of the members to point me to a brand new backdoor virus and install it in my PC and laptop. The kaspersky took about 10 days to find the backdoor (time for the kaspersky to find out there was a new backdoor in town and come up with a way to disable/ remove it) Norton took 6 weeks to alert me of a backdoor in my system but that was only one part of the problem... on virus installation Norton allowed the virus to disable Norton so unless you realised your anti virus was disabled you could live with the virus for ages.

I have no idea how good Norton is now but at the time I felt Norton were great at promoting their products as the best in the business when clearly was not like that.

The conclusion I got from this exercise was that I should only worry about backdoors as they don't tend to destroy data (not intended for that purpose - they live quietly in your system till they are found ) When you get a nasty virus that destroys data then you have no chance with any anti virus for the first couple of days the virus is out. After that the news is normally out and 99% of the anti virus have some sort cure/prevention for it.

I now use Avast and it seems to work quite well. The way viruses are transmitted nowadays is more complicated than before so being extra careful with emails and executables you download is not enough, we are now more exposed to viruses but common sense is still half of the battle anyway.

 

[pubrunner]

For extra security, I can strongly recommend MalwareBytes Anti-Malware security; it is free and is an easy to use package.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

On my own PC, I have Sophos antivirus, Spybot Search & Destroy, Spyware Blaster and MalwareBytes Anti-Malware.

There is a difference between Viruses and Malware/Spyware and in my opinion, it is important to guard against both.

Be aware that there are many rogue programs which simply do not provide proven, reliable anti-spyware protection and may be prone to ridiculous false positives. They often use unfair, deceptive, high pressure sales tactics to scare up sales from gullible, confused users. Messages may appear saying

"You have 182 instances of spyware/viruses on your PC, click here to subscribe to our program".

Getting rid of these messages can be very difficult; some of these programs can prevent you from downloading other programs which could be used to remove them. MalwareBytes Anti-Malware is excellent at removing such 'false messages'.

Confusingly, such programs often have names which are similar to programs which do work. Spybot S & D is a genuine program, Spywarebot is a rogue program. Programs such as WinAntiVirus 2006, WinAntiSpyware and WinAntiSpy (there are many more) sound like bona fide programs, but they are all rogues

To find out which programs are safe and which are not, take a look at this link http://www.spywarewarrior.com/