Bitdefender found 29 viruses that avast! missed!

I had avast! Free antivirus installed on all my family members' Laptops as I did feel it was good and its ratings on AV Comparative sites were on par with paid products.

Now since I recently purchased a 4 year / 5 User Bitdefender Internet Security License, yesterday while I was at my mom's place, I started uninstalling avast! from my sister's computer, then from my step dad's computer.

Now on my step dad's computer something felt really weird, it was horribly slow although the specs were good (i7 CPU with 4 GB RAM), as soon as I installed Bitdefender Internet Security and ran a scan, it found 29 viruses/trojans

I am happy that it did but this makes me not trust any free solution out there because we *think* that we are safe just because the AV does not show a pop up that there is a virus but in the reality of it, who knows how many viruses Free AV users may have.

 

1. No AV gets 100% of infections.

2. Free AVs can do as well as paid ones according to independent tests.

3. Why didn't they have MBAM for a second opinion?

4. Are you sure none of those were false-positives?

5. Were they serious infections or just adware/PUPS?

6. This is basically AvB with Avast! and BitDefender.

Sorry but it seems you really jumped to conclusions.

 

Agreed. Un-quantifiable data and massive assumption. Most of the infected PC's we see have paid AV's installed. Go figure!

 

Déjà vu

 

No AV catches 100% of malware out there.

 

your best bet to know if they were real or not, you should have uploaded them to virustotal and search for them online. If many detect them then is real but if a couple detect then maybe false positive.

By the way you could use hitman pro on those detections and see if it finds them. Hitman pro has the highest detection rate of any av.

 

Were they active in memory or just sitting there doing nothing?

 

If somebody treats their PC like a toaster. IE doesn't check updates (OS, programs etc.) or scans. Whatever AV they're running after a number of months will miss infections.

 

There's a lot of reasons that this can happen, and it can and will happen to all of them.

The first thing that comes to mind is that some solutions focus on the active files, and can leave remnants that others may pick up. In such cases the resident AV will have protected the computer against infection, and what's detected later is just junk files that pose no threat.

 

The question (and basically the only question here) is what were the detections. avast! doesn't detect PUP's by default, BitDefender as far as i know does. And in the PUP's segment you can quickly make up large numbers which are essentially harmless as such...

 

http://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php

http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/rap-index.xml
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/RAP/RAP-quadrant-May-Dec12-1200.jpg

http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-user/windows-7/sepoct-2012/

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http://www.av-comparatives.org/

 

well in my subjective view, i never really liked Avast for various reasons, yours being one of them
but it is a massive assumption that free products don't protect your PC

now if you want my opinion of what to install on a PC which is used by someone who is not in the know of security products and needs a set and forget protection
Avira Free (has the best detection rate acc to AV-C, and my personal experience) and Comodo Firewall (use learning mode for 10 minutes)
and maybe Shadow Defender

its really a waste of time installing MBAM or any 2nd scanner in your case, as the chances are it won't be used ever.

and if your dad uses Google Chrome browser, install Adblock Plus and Notscript

 

ot posts removed. Thread closed as per Tos