>Got tired of the constant prompts to upgrade and update. Seems like >nothing can happen in Avast without end user's involvement. I don't want >the end user updating anything. I don't want to be notified that "Avast >Upgrades are now on special!" All that does is cause my end users to >contact me wanting to know what to do. > >All I want my AV solution to do is >a) block viri >b) update itself without being told to >c) keep off the screen > >Avast was pretty good with a, not at all with b, and terrible with >c....although your mileage may vary. And yes, I even bought 10 Avast >licenses for one client and they still had pop ups on the screen down by >the system tray. I am soooo tired of answering "What was that blue box >there for down by the clock this morning when I turned on my monitor?"
For a networking situation you can get Avast! Business Pro, and manage the anti-virus clients from a server (doesn't require an actual server OS). It does take some tweaking to get it to perform unobtrusively. But if all you want it to do is monitor incoming email, traffic across websites, and opening of files, then once you have it configured it will do all that without being obtrusive. I'm no Avast evangelist. No anti-virus software, despite claims to be able to use "heuristics" to detect "patterns" and "templates", effectively defends against malware that it does not specifically recognize in detail--that is, malware that the anti-malware company has not already identified and planned for. Even if you update your definitions every couple of hours, all real-time anti-malware programs as well as after-the-fact scanners miss things. That's why you need one real-time program and two manual scanners and you need to do regular scans with all of them. And all of them will also identify a certain number of false positives. Nothing is perfect. But IMO Avast as a program is more efficient in its use of system resources, and a much more honest corporate citizen than AVG. It's more flexible than Trend Micro. And I can't see why anyone would trust a Microsoft "security" product when it's Microsoft that creates the security problems with its swiss-cheese operating systems in the first place. As for user behavior: These days malware can infect a computer even when the user has updated real-time anti-malware scanners running, is running a restricted account, using a browser other than IE, and has not manually interacted with anything other than their standard software, and the user will not even know it has happened. All it takes is visiting an infected website, once--and there's no predicting which websites will be infected. The only way to "educate" users effectively to avoid getting their machines infected is to disconnect their machines from the internet or turn them off completely. Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
