anti-virus Webscanner & Realtime protection necessary?

I'm playing with the idea of turning off the Avast Webscanner & Realtime protection. I would be making use of the Sandbox, on-demand scans, and good ole safe computing behavior.

I was wondering what you guys think of this? My main focus is on the Webscanner. Do you guys feel this module is necessary? Does it prevent infections? It seems like if it protects you from infection by simply visiting a website it would be helpful. But it's not finding zero-day, only known threats and as soon as it's discovered the site is going to neutralize it anyways, right?

Hoping to hear your thoughts and discussion.

 

Wrong, it uses the whole arsenal to detect and block both known and unknown threats.

And the hijacked sites usually don't "neutralize" anything, i.e. it typically takes very long time before site owners react and clean their sites up, when infected.

Thanks
Vlk

 

I'll never understand ppl disablin real-time scanning. It's like turning off airbags in a car saying that you'll drive carefully. This especially applies for file infectors where you just can't tell which is infected and which is not. These are not the most wide spread type of malware but still they exist.

 

Try out one of these two DNS services:

http://www.clearclouddns.com/

http://nortondns.com/

Having a 3rd party DNS server block out the majority of malicious websites reduces the need for a good web scanner since they'll block access to the websites completely based on virus detection signatures.

 

I'd say that if you're running with Avast only, your idea is risky. If you have other layers (e.g. Sandboxie, DefenseWall, Shadow Defender) then you could probably do it without compromising your computer security and gaining some speed.