Do you use anti-virus software?

[DoomUK]

By "anti-virus software", I'm referring to the stuff that is intended to always run in the background on your machine, customised preferences notwithstanding. AVG, Norton, McAfee, Avast, Avira et all.

Yay or Nay?

Furthermore, do you subscribe to this "conspiracy theory" that all viruses and malware are actually created by the companies who design anti-virus and anti-malware software in order to sell/distribute their product?


EDIT: Can one of the mods be so kind as to remove the backslashes that my fingers accidentally threw in in the poll options? Merci.

[ManCannon]

Avast is pretty good, none of them are perfect though, i also use Zone Alarm.

[negke]

I used to have Norton AV and FW, but at some point their programs became all holistic and totalitarian so I switched to Comodo Internet Security. It has firewall, antivirus, system defense/sandbox, but it's free and regularly updated. Though I guess the best protection from viruses and the like is common sense.

[Gez]

DoomUK said:

Furthermore, do you subscribe to this "conspiracy theory" that all viruses and malware are actually created by the companies who design anti-virus and anti-malware software in order to sell/distribute their product?

No. While I wouldn't be surprised if some companies have written some viruses -- maybe even without ill intentions, just for testing some heuristics and then accidentally the virus got out and spread -- I certainly wouldn't think one moment that ALL viruses have been created by anti-virus companies. There are simply too many other people who benefits from viruses and assorted malware; especially trojans. Botnets represent more potential money than antiviruses, so you get to the point where both sides of your "business" would actively harm each other: if your antivirus works, you lose your botnet, and if your antivirus doesn't work, you lose your customers.

As for antivirus software, Avast, Antivir and AVG have generally good reputation (AVG's has declined last year though) for free programs; while Kaspersky has a good reputation for commercial ones. Norton is universally reviled as atrocious crap which hasn't been any good since the MS DOS days. I also heard that MS's Security Essentials was better than one would expect from Microsoft.

[kristus]

Gez said:

As for antivirus software, Avast, Antivir and AVG have generally good reputation (AVG's has declined last year though) for free programs; while Kaspersky has a good reputation for commercial ones. Norton is universally reviled as atrocious crap which hasn't been any good since the MS DOS days. I also heard that MS's Security Essentials was better than one would expect from Microsoft.

Don't forget Nod32 which is a solid anti-virus suit for a good price. I'm myself using MS security essentials and it has served me well for the last year.

[Belial]

DoomUK said:

Yay or Nay?

yay

Furthermore, do you subscribe to this "conspiracy theory" that all viruses and malware are actually created by the companies who design anti-virus and anti-malware software in order to sell/distribute their product?

lolno

[fraggle]

[Gez]

There actually are Unix viruses. (And Mac viruses, etc.) It's mostly security through obscurity in that as long as Linux remains a niche OS it won't attract the bulk of virus making. There's also a better safety by design in that a Linux virus won't generally be run as root, but even then, it can still replicate and potentially deal damage with user rights, and there are always exploits (including some interesting vulnerabilities that are not in the code itself but are introduced by compiler optimizations). Let's not forget that the very first computer worm was for Unix systems.


Now if he had said "I run BeOS", the yeah, he'd be safe. Nobody is ever going to bother writing a virus for that. :p

[Enjay]

1) Yes (antivir) and it has saved me a number of times. eg, recently I took a memory stick to a friend's house to transfer some files to his machine for him (it was plugged into his computer for no more than 30 seconds). When I got home, I plugged the stick in to my machine and Antivir popped up immediately telling me that it would not run the autorun file on the stick and gave me 4 more errors too. Thing is, I had never had an autorun file on the stick. Anti-vir offered to clear it out for me but I wanted to invetigate it a bit more for myself (without running anything obviously). I transferred the stick to an older, secure machine and I looked at the files on the stick Sure enough, flagged as hidden ans system, there it was - a file called autorun.inf which was actually an executable exploit in disguise. There were also 4 more files that looked like shortcuts but, again, were actually executables in disguise. It was a simple matter to nuke them without any harm being done to my machines. And I was able to go back to my friend armed with information about the nature of his infection - and that made clearing his machine easier too.

As a matter of procedure, I check any file that I download on to my machine (even though Antivir sits memory resident and does it too) and I regularly do full sweeps of my machine for viruses and other malware with a number of programs (not just Antivir).

I do a lot of stuff online, I download and upload a lot of files and I also do quite a bit of stuff on other people's computers. Because of this I am pretty careful - I don't want to get a virus, nor do I want to transfer one to someone else. As a result, however, I have come across a fair number of viruses. Most of the time, these are on other people's computers. It really isn't unusual to fire up someone's machine to find it is infested - I've found three like that this year already. Occasionally I find viruses in files that I am trying to download. However, because I am pretty fussy, these usually get picked up long before they can do harm. My own machine has only ever got infected a very small number of times, and not for a very long time. I have never had any significant damage due to a virus - unlike the messes I have seen on other people's machines.

2) No. I'm pretty sure that companies exploit things like Limewire & Frostwire to either use it for back door advertising or to try and make the system so useless that people stop using it. Indeed, some companies proudly declare that they use the gnutella network for advertising. They have software that sits there listening for search strings and then generates files that have the same name as the search string you enter into Limewire/Frostwire. The companies who do this overtly claim that it is no different to using a Google search to create a targeted advert. Most of the time these files are, apparently, just recordings or videos of some advertising or other but I believe that more harmful exploits also get distributed in the same way.

However, I don't think that Norton et al are throwing viruses out there to increase paranoia to increase their sales. There's no need. There's plenty of paranoia about it already.

[Enjay]

Gez said:

There actually are Unix viruses. (And Mac viruses, etc.)

Indeed there are. Having worked in a few places that used Macs, all of the public access ones were always choking under the weight of viruses they were running. However, that reminded me of...

[GreyGhost]

DoomUK said:

Yay or Nay?

Indubitably, there's no way I'd connect an unprotected Windows-based PC to the Internet.

Furthermore, do you subscribe to this "conspiracy theory" that all viruses and malware are actually created by the companies who design anti-virus and anti-malware software in order to sell/distribute their product?

I had my suspicions many years ago when virus strains numbered in the low thousands - not any more. It's doubtful that the anti-virus industry could afford the manpower required to create over 70,000 new malware strains every day.

[DoomUK]

Macs

Viruses

a.k.a. Maes-bait. He'll be here shortly I expect ;)

[Planky]

I don't use protection, it feels much better, despite the child support payments.

Seriously though, I use Security Essentials. Before that I used nothing for over a year and had any problems. Prior to that it was Avira and AVG (which is now horribly bloated)

[Maes]

DoomUK said:

Yay or Nay?

Yay, and using NOD32 and Avast (depending on the environment) the last 5-6 years. Never looked back at KAV and that nastiness that used to be Norton.

DoomUK said:

(Macs & Viruses) a.k.a. Maes-bait. He'll be here shortly I expect ;)

I am here, but you totally got me from the wrong side on this one :-)
I do agree with that comic though: buying into the whole Mac/iProduct hype is all the rip-off one will ever need. There are tons of overpriced services and products aimed specifically at ripping off Apple (or wannabe so) users legally, why bother with low-key social engineering and high-noise malware data scraping?

DoomUK said:

Furthermore, do you subscribe to this "conspiracy theory" that all viruses and malware are actually created by the companies who design anti-virus and anti-malware software in order to sell/distribute their product?

Even if it was true at one time, maybe the mid 80s, by now there's an actual criminal market behind it. It was one thing to scare off companies using isolated computers when floppies were "hot shit" for moving data (and viruses) around, and another when there are credit card numbers and other data to steal, in a world where everybody and the cat is connected.

TL; DR: if it once was true, this no longer matters, because by now there sure are plenty of malware writers that are "the real deal", if that can make you feel less of a sucker somehow.

[Xeros612]

Of course I use it. So long as assholes keep making things for Windows OS's, I'm going to run antivirus. I'm honestly surprised Macs haven't gotten hit harder with how popular that OS is with hipsters and kids these days.

[Maes]

Xeros612 said:

Of course I use it. So long as assholes keep making things for Windows OS's, I'm going to run antivirus. I'm honestly surprised Macs haven't gotten hit harder with how popular that OS is with hipsters and kids these days.

Probably because Mac OS intended as the desktop, Unix-like, Darwin-based OS, represents a minority even among users of Apple products. I would not be surprised to hear that there are more users of iOS (the stuff powering iPods, iPhones and iPads) than there are pure Mac desktop users, and so any -potentially lucrative- virus or malware would have to hit those with priority, and then again focus on non-system/non-OS attacks (like Win32 viruses still do, instead).

The frequent changes of API and relative obscurity of OS features also makes it hard and not worthwhile to learn to bang the system as hard as Win32 with Mac OS (any version, really). Imagine if Microsoft forsake Win32 out of the blue one day, and while it was there it also ditched Intel i386 and x64 forever. Wham. Mass extinction of software (and viruses).

[Sharessa]

I use AVG. I should probably switch to something else, but I haven't had any serious viruses in nearly a decade, so it seems fine to me.

[Grazza]

I don't like anti-virus programs that take over your computer and want to scan every damn thing just because you're moving it, copying it, etc. That can result in a huge waste of processing power.

I use Clamwin and scan anything that is new to my computer such as downloads. Every so often I leave it to scan my entire system overnight. It seems to do a pretty good job. For malware, adware, etc., I use Spybot.

As for viruses as a scam... a lot of the people who work in the anti-virus industry started off as virus writers, whether maliciously or not. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the anti-virus companies are running a scam - just that they are recruiting the people who know most about how these things work.

[Maes]

Grazza said:

As for viruses as a scam... a lot of the people who work in the anti-virus industry started off as virus writers, whether maliciously or not. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the anti-virus companies are running a scam - just that they are recruiting the people who know most about how these things work.

Don't forget that the nature of what we call a "computer virus" has changed considerably over time. In the olden days, writing a virus which would only have a chance to spread via BBS or via floppies (at best) involved a totally different way of thinking and different expectations from the author himself: his virus would be activated (if ever) on some isolated home computer in somebody's basement running a pirated game, and be wiped simply by formatting a floppy and/or powering the machine off (some of these machines didn't even have a resident OS to pass on the infection consistently). The only "reward" the author would ever get, would be knowing -hoping- that he has "h4x0r3d" somebody's machine, wiped the FAT of his hard disk clean off, caused a random reset, or just displayed a funny message on the screen.

OK, there were a few -very few- viruses that actually came out with outright demands for money (or included the author's contact info) but those are dead and gone, and their authors mostly made the headlines as "famous convicted hackers" of the 80s and the 90s.

Today, what we call "malware" is usually concocted in some Chinese or Taiwanese or Russian "cyber sweatshop" as part of a greater criminal network, usually with a botnet structure etc. and has the very explicit purpose of stealing valuable personal data, so those "viruses" will gain nothing if they issue a Halt And Catch Fire instruction on random machines. Quite a different story from the "pure e-peen" approach of those old, "romantic" days.

[Aliotroph?]

Nope. I used to have AVG, but then it started taking on behaviours of the big three (Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro) and I just nuked it. I found when those things break they can be as bad as the malware they attempt to kill. Lots of the less-known ones are far better, but I prefer to use non-automatic tools when the need arises.

The closest I have seen to that olde conspiracy theory panning out was the variety of trojan that was also an AV. The kind that pretend to be AVs are common, but some of them actually are! They will remove their competition from the machine while working and propagating to their own ends. One of them, which was also a scam you could purchase, even had its own tech support number. Fun stuff. :D

[Maes]

Aliotroph? said:

The closest I have seen to that olde conspiracy theory panning out was the variety of trojan that was also an AV. The kind that pretend to be AVs are common, but some of them actually are! They will remove their competition from the machine while working and propagating to their own ends. One of them, which was also a scam you could purchase, even had its own tech support number. Fun stuff. :D

Good observation. But even those are piggybacking on a phenomenon that has already been fired off, and are just trying to get their share of the pie.

Regardless of whether viruses started off as some sort of perverse ransomware by AV companies, their mechanics and way of operating has been adopted and exploited for "legitimate" malicious and criminal purposes, and it's way out of hand now.

[Csonicgo]

MSE. It's caught things even mbam couldn't catch.

[EarthQuake]

Nope, don't need one. Common sense and keeping my system updated has served me relatively well over the years.

[Maes]

EarthQuake said:

Nope, don't need one. Common sense and keeping my system updated has served me relatively well over the years.

Sometimes that is not enough. I've seen more than one "drive by" download starting even in Mozllla (usually patched with a security update soon after) but in those cases, only the AV software saved my (figurative) ass.

[chungy]

Use Linux, no need.

(OK, I have a Windows installation and it has MS Security Essentials on it...)

[Remilia Scarlet]

Yes, but only because I can get it for free, and only on my one Windows computer. Even then, I disable it when writing music so I can squeeze out a few more bits of power.

My other seven machines run Linux.

[gggmork]

Hi guys, I have like a lol picture too:
http://www.2flashgames.com/images_/f-Antivirus-Blackmail-6473-th.jpg
*feels satisfied that I posted a lol picture*

[Technician]

EarthQuake said:

Nope, don't need one. Common sense and keeping my system updated has served me relatively well over the years.

I watch way too much porn to rely on common sense.

[Marnetmar]

MSE and common sense are my two favorite antiviruses.

[Xaser]

I'd find it strange to not have any antivirus at all in this day and age. Sure, a firewall is arguably a more important line of defense, but nothing's perfect.

Marnetmar said:

MSE and common sense are my two favorite antiviruses.

This, however, is a damn fine combination.