what sort of protections did he have in place in lieu of having no AV in real time? I very rarely dl files, have all the apps I need installed, and I use LUA & SRP. I cannot infect my virtual machine even if I deliberately try to. So considering that, plus that I rarely if ever dl anything, and even if I do I can on demand scan it with tools or online with virustotal or something similar, and I find the constant reads/writes of an AV app wasteful and performance hindering, its a complete waste of time to folks like me. Considering how easy AV's are bypassed, how do you not know your infected?? j/k
There is not any reason, why you have to have it as well, if you can not get infected. It is pointless just like systray updaters or other useless backround software. It is actually better to scan with various ondemand AVs than to use just one brand realtime. And as you pointed out in 3, AV can even not detect rootkits and such. Anyway, it is also about risk assessment. What would happen, if I would get infected? Nothing, I would just do a clean instal and my PC would be working in ~3 houres.
Once a month, I use several On-Demand Scanners to check my System. (e.g. HTP, MBAM, EEK, SAS, F-Secure Easy Clean, AVZ, GMER, UnHackMe, Teazer Rootkit Razor etc.) They have found Nothing. Since 2007, I've used a Sandbox (e.g. Sandboxie OR DefenseWall) together with either Instant System Recovery Software (e.g. Rollback Rx, EAZ-FIX or AyRecovery) OR Boot-to-Restore Virtualization Software (e.g Shadow Defender or Returnil). [FONT="][/FONT]
He was using Comodo at first then he had problems with it and changed to Online Armor, then he had some issues with OA and changed to Malware Defender. For some reason he settled Privatefirewall + Avast and that's what he uses now. It is not known what he as using when he got those infections but he always had an HIPS program running, never installed untrusted software or would let anyone else use his system. All the infections were very easily removed with Avast. There was no telling how long these infections were on his system since he never did any scans more than 3 years. Since Avast detected and removed them all, it proved to him that real-time AV is useful. I can understand why some people don't want to use real-time, but the benefits pay off to a lot of users especially novice who don't know how to use other methods for protection and like myself who is completely fed up with messing with buggy HIPS programs that just causes unstable system state. I keep backups of my system with TrueImage, where I can restore my complete partitions if needed. I don't understand why some users would re-install Windows and have to setup everything from scratch. Not to mention all of those Windows Updates. I never have to do a complete re-install of Windows. Thanks.
interesting, thx. I've always wanted to research how easy it is to bypass HIPS but haven't had the time. HIPS seem to be more for intermediate to advanced users, wrong settings or answers to pop-ups can be costly.
There has been an in-depth discussion that shows different angles and point of views over this old-age debate here: So how firmly do you believe in today's AV detections? I've stated my mind over this matter here if anyone is interested in reading. I'm particularly fond of Rmus and Sully's take on the matter too.
Yeah, my pc system is guarded by a robot and his name is Eset NOD32... And also, my system was surrounded by a layers of bricks and it was called DefenseWall Personal Firewall... Just in case viruses try to slipped thru by means of USB flash drives, then another highly trained x-marine guard will intercept them...and it is called USB Disk Security.. Real-time Anti-virus and scanners, even if some pc experts says that it's already dead and are obsolete...still it's one of the most important first line of defense especially to average cyber surfers.
Trying out real time Anti-Virus protection again. Currently with Avira AntiVir Personal Free. So far so good,no slowdowns or conflicts.
Yes. Using Avast 6 Free. Avira is good, but far too many false positives. I dumped NOD as it also started giving me too many false positives. I've heard that there is a Free Norton AV ...anyone use it?
Really? I think you must be the first person I see to have issues with too many fp's with NOD32 hmmm.... With Avira I can understand but not with NOD32. No Offense
No offense taken! Also, since Eset (IMO) started bloating NOD more and more after v2.7 I started looked for another. Now I could back off the heuristic scanning a bit with NOD and not get many heuristic false positives, but I got frankly tired of reseaching/ then restoring. Avast now uses less resources than NOD (configured in basic format anyway), so I changed 'horses'. I think like some others - I probably don't really need an AV - HIPS would do, but I scan frequently with Malwarebytes and it finds nothing - so Avast 6 Free is doing the job on Spyware/ malware also - and good enough virus protection w/ little resource usage.
I See. Yes lowering the Heur a bit would certainly make the FP's go away. Also, for me NOD is the lightest, and when I tried Avast I felt a little drag on the system. But as always it will change from system to system. And I would probably test something else if I felt how you did as well. But soon BETA 5.0 will be released so maybe you will come back then.... Edit: I never got the chance to try out version 2.7 of NOD unfortunately, so I can't tell how I would feel about the current version if I had tried out 2.7
Only on-demand and no removal (Noton Security Scan). Norton Power Eraser includes removal, but doesn't scan with AV sigs. That is unless you're into w@rez.
It is true, theoretically malware could install with or without an active AV. Something needs to execute though in order to install, and a virtualizer/sandbox is absolutely necessary for unknown infections.
I have in the past but right now I'm not. Prefer virtualisation and sandboxing at the moment. Still use a bunch of on-demand scanners and other apps. Not sure I'd like to be totally naked
On my desktop I use already makes about 6 months Norton Internet Security 2011, on the laptop I don't usually use anti-virus but now I'm testing the Avast! Internet Security (I earned my license in December) and am liking it a lot!
