Oh I love these types of topics. Right off the bat I would say there is NO AV that gives that great of coverage. Kaspersky(verified) has good coverage and NOD32(unverified) has good coverage. The bad part is even of these good AV vendors their coverage is maybe 60%. What is interesting though is that it's mainly a psychological thing for us to have a AV scanner on our system. Personally I don't even see them as that important for myself because I know what's usually going on and I reformat frequently (every 3-6 months).
But scanning your computer and finding a virus when another av didn't find that virus is not a good test of the av products. If you want to be safe you gotta lock your computer down and do some hardcore prevention. Here are a few things you can do to be semi safe - Router/Firewall on broadband connections with NAT turned on - Zone Alarm or similar on - Frequent patching of all software - Apply Application restriction policies found in local security policies (basically you can lock your machine down from running new exe's and dll's) - Use firefox if you absolutely must browse the net on that computer - Use vmware image setup for your other activities ie downloading stuff from p2p, checking mail, surfing the net, torrents, porn, whatever. And always revert your images to a clean state after. And only copy files over when you're totally sure they are clean - Run one of the two av products mentioned earlier It's scary now because organized crime and other elements are involved in trying to make money the wrong way so they hire 10-15 hardcore programmers to find exploits in the operating system and other software to make money. For example that WMF exploit was used for weeks possibly months before it was even found by the security community. That means they were installing crapware on your computer without your knowledge and AV's knowledge for a long time. Imagine what could be going on now? How many sites might have you visited that could have installed something? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Zulfiqar Naushad Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 4:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [H] Antivirus There used to be a time when I didn't have AV scanners. I used to know the source of my files and had precautions not to infect my machine(s). That worked till I inadvertently surfed to a shoddy website. 2 days of hair pulling later, I decided to reformat and switch 100% to firefox. That worked for a while till I got infected again! Anyways, long story short, I bought Kaspersky with a 1 year reg and really liked the program, it was good and did the job well. However last weekend my Kaspersky key expired. First thought was to whip out my Mastercard and buy another 1 year license. But I decided to give the other products a look. In the end I ended up buying NOD32. Guess what, right off the bat after installation and after updating the DAT files, it found a trojan! This was a trojan that Kaspersky did not recognize!! What irks me is that does one now have to have 3 antivirus programs running catching viruses that the others miss? Is there a GOOD program that catches all viruses, or 99.9% of them? NOD32 is now my fave AV program. It is light and has a lot of good features. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
