antivirus - do they all deactivate when licience expires ?

[vhelp]

my anti virus (system shield) deactivated today. it is "x" out in my tray. i'm so mad. i have no protection and it only offers to forward me to a site to renew, which i never do online. i'm too busy to go to the store to purchase another shield at the moment, let alone the money aspects.

but, for now, can someone please explain to me, which is correct:

a) we purchased their app, and within the time limits of the apps licience we recieve free updates to the app and also the definitions.
b) or, are we renting their app only, and withing time limits of licience, receive free updates to app and/or also definitions.
c) or, are we renting their app and definitions with the time limit of licence (1 year) and then the app is deactivated.

you see, i always thought that we own (via licience) but that we receive free updates within thet licience period, and once time is up, we no longer recieve the free updates, but the app would still continue to function as it was intended.

otherwise, i think maybe its time to just download a freeware, perhaps AVG ?

thank you.

[nic2k4]

I can't say about your AV, but with Zonealarm Suite you lose the ability to update definitions and you can't access parts of the AV control panel. But, it keeps on protecting the PC; this I am certain of, as I have it set to do a scan on startup and it does it even when it's expired. At times I manually stop the scan, but when it's expired I'm unable to access that function.

You could switch to Microsoft Security Essentials, it's free, pretty good (if you don't live dangerously) and it's not a ressource and performance hog like some of the other freebies. Windows Firewall works just fine. Change your DNS server to OpenDNS or Google DNS for added protection against phishing and DNS hijacking.

[aedipuss]

you own it for the year the license is valid. what happens after that is up to the company and what is in the terms of service you agreed to. but i'd be happy it expired, it's rated one of the worst a/v programs out there.

any chance you have comcast cable? they offer norton a/v for free as long as you're a customer. otherwise mse works as a free a/v if you don't visit/download strange things.

[lordsmurf]

I've also switched to Microsoft Security Essentials for now.
It runs with a much lower RAM/CPU footprint than something like Norton or McAfee.

Also good advice:
Change your DNS server to OpenDNS or Google DNS for added protection against phishing and DNS hijacking.

And then WinPatrol is good at halting things from adding themselves into your startups.
I've used that tool for most of the past decade. Very helpful!

[ranchhand]

I have used Avira free for years and put it on all the client units I work on. The popup ad screens are easy to stop. I use Firefox with Noscript so I have no Active X infection problems (although Noscript take a little getting used to I will admit).

[hello_hello]

you see, i always thought that we own (via licience) but that we receive free updates within thet licience period, and once time is up, we no longer recieve the free updates, but the app would still continue to function as it was intended.

thank you.

That's the way it normally works, and it's pretty poor if for a particular program it doesn't.

Are you looking for antivirus only or are you after a security "suite"? Personally I think the former is all you really need, with maybe the exception of a firewall if you're not behind a router and/or want something better than the Windows firewall. In my case I don't even run antivirus anymore as after years and years of never seeing anything but the occasional false positive I decided there was very little point. Anyway......

If antivirus is your main concern and you want something free, the usual suspects are Antivir, Avast, AVG, Microsoft. The order in which I listed them is also the order in which they successfully detect viruses, with Antivir pretty much always detecting the most in tests and Microsoft detecting the least. For some reason the Microsoft program was improving steadily for a while, but according to the last couple of test results I read it was back in last place again. The above only applies to detecing viruses. I've never paid much attention to malware detection abilities.

av-comparatives.org is a good place to look for evaluating the performance of antivirus programs or security suites. They test both paid and free software and break the testing down into areas such as virus detection and removal, malware detection, scanning speed etc. They also test for the ability to detect "known" viruses (generally the program's virus definitions are used for that) vs the ability to detect "unknown" viruses etc (heuristic virus detection where the antivirus program makes it's best guess).

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

PS As mentioned earlier Antivir annoys you with a popup advertisement for the paid version whenever it updates itself. And as also mentioned earlier it's easy enough to stop it from doing so. It's just a matter of telling Windows the executable which runs the popup ad doesn't have permission to run. You'll find instructions for doing so via Google without too much trouble.

[jman98]

More and more businesses are operating under the belief that their customers are only renting their products. The MPAA and RIAA have had this idea for years.

I used to use AVG but they made it so incredibly difficult to get the free version that I just gave up and went with Avast. I still would prefer AVG, but Avast is OK and at least they do make it easy enough to get their free version and keep it updated.

I also think that lordsmurf's suggestion on changing your DNS server is outstanding and you should do what he says. I changed to OpenDNS some years ago after tiring of dealing with AT&T's periodic DNS outages and in a few cases deliberate attempts to return invalid DNS information about sites that they apparently don't approve of.

[Nelson37]

You do not OWN software. You purchase the "right to use it". You have the only AV prog I have ever heard of that completely stops working when expired, all others simply stop updating but continue to function without the latest information.

I try very hard to never install a Norton product, and I get paid to so such things. One of the very first things to remove on a problem system.

2 out of 5 Avast installs had severe problems and caused systems to become unusable. I WILL NOT install that program again.

MSE decent and cheap. AVG a little bit better but a bit of a resource hog. It DOES NOT, however, cause problems and that's why I've installed it hundreds of times.

If you do not have MalwareBytes and CCLeaner, get them. Fast, free, no resources constantly used, and they never do harm.

If a program I recommend and install does harm, I have to go out and solve the problem, for free. That don't put food on my table.

As for updating the free AVG, I have experienced no problem or issue nor have many deeply in-experienced users reported any issues. It's pretty straighforward and simple.

[Hoser Rob]

I use(d) microsoft security essentials under windows because that's what the tech support people at the local university recommend. It's free, doesn't try to to upsell you, and integrates well with windows (far fewer false positives).

And, above all, no antivirus programs actually work anyway. Not one. They all let stuff through.

+1 on malwarebytes and cccleaner too.

[aedipuss]

You do not OWN software. You purchase the "right to use it". You have the only AV prog I have ever heard of that completely stops working when expired, all others simply stop updating but continue to function without the latest information.

i believe the courts have decided differently. you are allowed to re-sell used software, so you do "own" it. at least in the usa.

[El Heggunte]

You do not OWN software. You purchase the "right to use it". You have the only AV prog I have ever heard of that completely stops working when expired, all others simply stop updating but continue to function without the latest information.

i believe the courts have decided differently. you are allowed to re-sell used software, so you do "own" it. at least in the usa.

IANAL, but if someone can BUY the-right-to-use-an-application, then the same someone can SELL the right they have bought.

[hello_hello]

How third party DNS resolvers can impact performance
http://shaun.net/2011/02/how-third-party-dns-resolvers-can-impact-performance/
Personally I think if you're computer savvy enough to know how to change your DNS server then you should be computer savvy enough not to require any of the (dubious) extra protection third party DNS server might provide.

[hello_hello]

I use(d) microsoft security essentials under windows because that's what the tech support people at the local university recommend. It's free, doesn't try to to upsell you, and integrates well with windows (far fewer false positives).

And, above all, no antivirus programs actually work anyway. Not one. They all let stuff through.

+1 on malwarebytes and cccleaner too.

90% of tech support people are clueless and another 9% of those are almost as clueless.

This is what avcomparitives found when conducting their antivirus tests in March this year. Here's the detection rates of known viruses for the usual four suspects (antivirus programs which are either free or have a free version).
http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/docs/avc_fdt_201203_en.pdf

Avira 99.4%
Avast 98.0%
AVG 96.4%
Microsoft 93.1%

You might want to ask the tech support people at the local university why they recommend an antivirus product which lets 7% of "known" viruses walk right past it and onto your PC.

Here's the detection rate for unknown viruses (heuristic detection):
http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/docs/avc_beh_201207_en.pdf

Avira 84%
Avast 77%
AVG 77%
Microsoft 77%

Heuristic detection rates are an indication as to why the false positive rates also differ. The more cautious an antivirus program is, the more it'll protect you and the more false positives it may offer..... as a general rule. Some antivirus programs let you adjust the level of "aggressiveness" for heuristic detection, or even disable it. I know Avira allows you to do so (the above tests would have been conducted using the default settings for each program). I'm not sure about the other three.

I've never quite 'got" the ccleaner craze. I don't know what it does (what it does which is actually useful) which I can't do myself very easily. And if I read one more time, someone offering advice to use it to clean the registry because it speeds up a PC I think my head will explode.

[hello_hello]

You do not OWN software. You purchase the "right to use it".

Why do otherwise seemingly intelligent people seem so willing to bend over for software companies when it comes to owning the software they "buy". It'd be like buying a book, getting it home and finding the first chapter explains how the seller was only foolin', you didn't buy the book after-all, and by continuing to read it you agree you didn't buy it. Wouldn't most people just laugh?

How many sellers of software advertise their software in terms of licensing it? Go to Microsoft's website. It's littered with suggestions to "buy" their software. If it walks like a duck......

The whole EULA licensing scam is software companies attempting to circumvent the usual rights of the consumer (the first sale doctrine in particular) using contract law. Except oddly enough they expect their customers to agree to a contract after they've taken the customer's money and before the customer has been able to read it.

EULAs should be completely ignored.

[KTH]

Norton anti-virus software definitely will stop working once the subscription expires. This wasn't true in the past when Norton products used to continue working, but it would just stop updating. I think that they do this so that people will pay for the highly overpriced subscription renewal. If you don't renew after several weeks they usually offer you a discount to re-subscribe, but that also means for several weeks you won't have any anti-virus protection.
Another free one time anti-virus scanner is HouseCall from Trendmicro. This software has found malware on my computer that was not detected by my main anti-virus software or malwarebytes.

[Steve(MS)]

Seems the biggest concern is not virus but malware, spyware, adware and rootkits.
I think that is where discussion needs to be centered on.

[Nelson37]

"Virus" has become a generic term to cover all "malware", which is actually a better word. Much "malware" uses a virus as part of the install routine, there is really a mixture.

CCleaner primarily removes Temp files and old, unused registry entries. Many people will tell you that this can speed up PC operations because they have seen it happen, many, many times.

When you buy a book, can you make 100 copies and sell them, or give them away? Can you re-write the ending so the hero Doesn't get the girl? Can you make a movie out of it? Virtually all "ownership" rights are limited in some way. If someone has seen a court decision and come away from that believing that you "own" software rather than the "right to use it", then there is some basic lack of understanding about what was said. Absolutely you can sell the rights that you have purchased. You can't modify it, make copies of it, or make it something else and sell that. You do not have full ownership rights to that software.

Where this relates to AV software is that the expiration is usually for updates, which are required for best functionality. Those updates are seperate from the software itself, and require an ongoing investment to provide. The question becomes did you buy a one year license for the software package, or did you buy a software package with a one-year subscription to updates?

Free software is great. Software that costs money is often better. There is a reason for this, good software costs money to create.

[lordsmurf]

90% of tech support people are clueless and another 9% of those are almost as clueless.
av-comparatives.org

I'm not entirely convinced that av-comparatives.org isn't the clueless one.

AV software use updates via subscription. When the subscription runs out, some or all of the software may stop working. And yes, there's a chance that this method is not entirely legal. That wouldn't surprise me one bit. I've never seen a whole app disable itself, though it's surely possible. Usually it just severs further updates, and cripples premium aspects of the software.

[fritzi93]

I don't use an AV program any more. I'm behind a router and only connect to the net via a disposable VM. Shared folders are strictly limited. Unless someone can tell me why that's insufficient, I'll continue doing it that way.

I recall one occasion when CCleaner was useful to clean an infection. It was one of those bogus security baddies that had copies of itself in several places. MBAM would peel off one layer okay, run it again and supposedly the thing was gone. Then reboot and voila!, back again. One place it ran from was temporary files, to which it would reload upon reboot.

Running CCleaner first, cleaning both temp files and registry allowed MBAM to get the damn thing, two scans. Then reboot and try again, and it was gone. Yeah, it could have been done manually, but using CCleaner was convenient.

Nevertheless, I deleted the VM folder and replaced it with a copy.

[hello_hello]

I don't use an AV program any more. I'm behind a router and only connect to the net via a disposable VM. Shared folders are strictly limited. Unless someone can tell me why that's insufficient, I'll continue doing it that way.

I haven't run antivirus myself for quite a while. I had a problem with Antivir (first time it'd even caused one) when a particular update caused a memory leak (XP only). It was fixed pretty quickly but in the mean time I'd uninstalled it and just never got around to installing an antivirus program again.

I don't run a firewall (behind a router too), I don't run antimalware, and at best I probably run Windows Update a couple of times a year. I'm still running XP using an administrator account. I travel to all sorts of dark corners of the internet, so how so many people manage to get infected is almost a mystery to me.

About a year ago I restored my Windows and programs image (that's my method of "cleaning"), updated Windows and programs etc then created another image. Before I did I installed an antivirus program and ran a scan just to be sure, but it didn't find anything. I'll probably go through the same procedure again sometime in the near future, but I'm not too worried it'll find anything this time either.

[hello_hello]

CCleaner primarily removes Temp files and old, unused registry entries. Many people will tell you that this can speed up PC operations because they have seen it happen, many, many times.

The placebo effect can be quite effective. I used to suffer from it myself back in the early days. I mean.... if you've just spent hours deleting temp files, defragmenting and cleaning the registry, you'd want to the PC to be faster as a result, wouldn't you?
If there's a single performance test on the entire internet which proves the performance of a PC improved after the registry was cleaned I'm yet to see it. Lots of people will claim it's true, nowhere I know of is there a single piece of evidence to support it.

While I can see defragmenting maybe improving performace now and then, removing temp files? Not unless hard drives work differently to the way I understand it. It's not like when a file is requested the hard drive has to perform a search to look for the file, the contents are indexed and it knows where the file is. How does the location of a bunch of temp files slow down the process of the heads moving to the required position to load the requested file? At least when compared to loading the same file stored in the same place on the same platter after the temp files have been deleted? The heads aren't going to get there any faster. What if instead of deleting temp files you deleted user files? All your pictures, documents, videos etc? Would that speed up the loading of files any less than deleting a hundred MBs of temp files would?

When it comes to cleaning the registry.... typically, Windows has literally hundreds of thousands of registry entries. So you run CCleaner to "clean" the registry. How many registry entries does it find to "clean". A couple of dozen? Fifty? A few registry entries pointing to recently opened files which no longer exist, maybe configuration settings for a couple of programs which are no longer installed. How does removing a few dozen of the hundreds of thousand of registry entries speed things up to an extent any mere mortal would notice?

When you buy a book, can you make 100 copies and sell them, or give them away? Can you re-write the ending so the hero Doesn't get the girl? Can you make a movie out of it?

You're missing the distinction between owning the work contained within the book and owning the copy of the book you bought. In the US, there's the First Sale Doctrine which ensures you do, and that you have the right to resell a copy of a book you legally own. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
But for some reason software manufacturers attempt to bypass the first sale doctrine simply by claiming they were only foolin', they didn't sell you a copy of the software after-all, and so many people seem willing to bend over and let them get away with it. I don't get it.

[mammo1789]

I don't understand why people pay for antivirus antimalware, much of the free ones are even better then the paid ones and use less resources. Take for instance comodo free security it is even better than kaspersky ( which is very very good ) and it is 100% free Avast seems to be better than avira or avg in terms of protection and it is also 100 free. So you get excellent antivirus with the number one firewall and antimalware + you can use malwarebytes antimalware and you are safe. And whats more interesting this combination uses less resources than norton for instance I use it almost 2 years now and don't plan to pay for antivirus.

I'm not entirely convinced that av-comparatives.org isn't the clueless one.

I am not convinced that they are "independent " it is like believing rating agencies which rated CDO ( the most unsecured security ever) from Lehman brothers AAA ( which went bankrupt by the way ) because they were paid by the investment bankers to say that. It is the same with any other paid software in all the "independent" tests.

[aedipuss]

for comcast customers the new version of norton security suite is really too good to pass on. if you check the online ratings it ranks at or near the top this year. it has a very small footprint of about a 100MB install and only 2 processes running that use about 15MB of memory and i've never seen them using any cpu cycles while you are using the computer, at idle times they kick in to do background updates and scans.



i had stopped using norton products about 5 years ago when they had become bloated and tiresome to use. i used avg(paid) since then, until about 6 months ago when it expired, and the coverage provided by avg free was lacking.

this is just the free norton package i installed not the comcast "constant guard" bundle. best part it's free for as long as you are a comcast customer.

[nic2k4]

When it comes to buying AV software one thing is for sure, you're buying peace of mind (most likely some form of placebo effect too). That's fine if you don't go out and spend a $100/year; who knows you might load a warez CD from 15 years ago.

As was mentionned before, todays attack vectors are very different than back in the AV glory days. The main motivation behind malware is making money not showing off or playing pranks like it used to be. Most of the real harm is being done through 0-day exploits that are so advanced that no AV has a chance of stopping them.

Just lookup Stuxnet, Duqu, Gauss, Flame and here's a really scary story. By all accounts Stuxnet was out in the wild nearly 2 years before being discovered. All I'm saying is that any AV software comparison chart is meaningless, they're only trying to see if known malware can be detected reliably; the danger is the unknown.

The thing that gets me is you do a fresh OS install and everything runs swift and smooth, you install an AV and there's a noticeable degradation. If I'm gonna willingly degrade my system, I'd prefer to keep it to a minimum.

[fritzi93]

... you install an AV and there's a noticeable degradation. If I'm gonna willingly degrade my system, I'd prefer to keep it to a minimum.

Yes indeed. And as to zero-day exploits, if you encounter one and your AV hasn't yet been updated to deal with it....well, you're screwed. It seems to me you might as well use a lightweight blacklist type program like SpywareBlaster instead. That will protect against known baddies, and the list currently has over 15,000 entries.

I'm trying to think of the times that an AV program actually notified me it had blocked something. There weren't many, and some of them I'm pretty sure were false positives.

[nic2k4]

Yeah, false positives, here's another topic (check this out, the ultimate false positive). In 20 years, I can say an AV has prevented an infection twice for me. However, I've had hundreds of false positives. The most maddening part is when something automatically gets put in quarantine. It's at the point I'm starting to think they're looking for keywords in filename.

The worst part is when you see a system you know is infected and even running the AV from a different OS doesn't fix it. In the end you have to re-install Windows anyway, so I just use a user migration tool to transfer the files back and save the wasted time scanning for malware.

Surfing through a VM is a good idea, but it has been shown that it's possible to get through the sandbox in VirtualBox (the latest version is patched). A dedicated PC might be better; clone the drive to an image file and restore it in case of problem. You might even want to run Linux on it. That opens a new possibility, run Linux as a Live CD off the HDD (or flash drive) with persistence (for things like bookmarks).

A place I used to work for got hit by a worm once, they got the AV update to stop it 2 hours too late. Funny thing is I got the email and knew enough not to open the attachment, but many people opened it. They were days working to get everybody back up, not to mention the server got compromised. The human is the weakest link and there's nothing an AV can do about it.

[mammo1789]

The human is the weakest link and there's nothing an AV can do about it.

perfectly right i had days that went without av active and never got any ( known probably virus or malware ) and my friend has Norton and gets them twice a month why? because he believes that Ana Kurnikova is calling him for dinner and that some wealthy Africans want to share with him their wealth they just ask him to give them his account number to transfer the money.

i will say it again i don't see point in paying for av. Comodo Internet Security has the best firewall of all and if you combine it with avast then you have solid protection of known viruses and malwares i cant find the test pages that it is not paid by anyone and comodo came first i think kaspersky second when i find it i will link it

[Hoser Rob]

Those test pages are pretty silly, even if they're not paid for. It doesn't make any sense to say AV x is better than AV y if it blocks 97% and the other blocks 94%. None. What that really says is that none of them actually work.

If you're that concerned ... and I never had any problems under windows, most of the people I know who did had young kids who'll click on anything ... get a Mac or (even better security wise) install linux. Then you'll have a system that's inherently reasonably secure. Unlike windows.

And then, even if you don't have to worry as much about viruses, there are still redirection scams using javascript. You can run noscript under firefox but the sort of people who are most susceptible to these problems wouldn't have a clue how to use it.

The problem is that people think they can use a system that's inherently easy to hack in to (ie. Windows) and then think installing an antivirus program will solve all their security concerns. Even when many security problems do not involve viruses at all.

There's a simple solution that provides total internet security. Just never go online. There is always a security risk.

[fritzi93]

Not to belabor the obvious, but if I had to choose between an AV program and a backup program...

I regularly make copies of my VM folders, and maintain a current disc image of my "C" drive host OS. Data on separate drives, with redundant copies (hard drives fail too). That means multiple physical drives, but so be it.

[hello_hello]

Those test pages are pretty silly, even if they're not paid for. It doesn't make any sense to say AV x is better than AV y if it blocks 97% and the other blocks 94%. None. What that really says is that none of them actually work.

Yeah..... I can see the logic there. An AV program which blocks 99.4% of known viruses obviously can't be better than one which only blocks 93.1% of them. If you were to assume the test results are accurate, to claim they show no AV program works at all is fairly silly.
I guess using the same logic you could say if browser "A" only renders 99.4% of web pages correctly while browser "B" only renders 93.1% of them correctly, there's therefore no browser which can render web pages. You could even say if hard drive "A" has a 0.06% failure rate in the first year, while hard drive "B" has a 6.9% failure rate, it doesn't mean one hard drive is more reliable than the other because all hard drives eventually fail.