Which anti-virus software would you all 'anyone' recommend?

[cornemuse]

I have been using 'AVG' (free version) for 3 or 4 years now & its getting progressively worse. Its turned this computer into a slug. Thought I was having problems with 'thumb drives bigger than 4 gigs. Turns out AVG has the prob with them. It ingores settings in options-> 'scan settings' (when to do scan) mainly. Plus more, , , (rebooting w/o option of delaying reboot, etc. etc.)

What are all the various recommendations from everyone here? Any & all welcome. I do not go to wierd/ bad sites, I am as careful/prudent as I can be. (I have Ubuntu on a separate older computer I use if I get a wild hair, actually would prefer it but too many things do not work with it. 'WINE' does not get it for me, sadly)

[redwudz]

I've been happy with the freeware version of Avast on all my PCs, though their pop up ads get a bit irritating. But it works well and it is free.

[hech54]

Avast Free Home for me too. Have it on 3 machines (this and two laptops).
I have always had it set to MANUAL update.

[usually_quiet]

I use Bitdefender (free) on my HTPC, an AMD dual core that will be 7 years old soon. I use AVG (free) on newer PCs.

[videobruger]

Always used Avira

[SameSelf]

I haven't run an AV in years. Who are these people that still get viruses in 2016? AFAIAC AVs are worse than viruses. They are intrusive, constantly nag you (cough, money please), slow things down, waste time, waste money, and waste my patience. I could go on, but here is the best part of all. There is growing evidence that running an AV actually exposes you to more risk than running without one! Took a while for researchers to come clean on what I suspected years ago.

Anyway, I invested in a quality imaging program. With modern SSDs, restoring a clean image takes about as long what it used to take to restart Windows on spinning rust.

[usually_quiet]

I haven't run an AV in years. Who are these people that still get viruses in 2016? AFAIAC AVs are worse than viruses. They are intrusive, constantly nag you (cough, money please), slow things down, waste time, waste money, and waste my patience. I could go on, but here is the best part of all. There is growing evidence that running an AV actually exposes you to more risk than running without one! Took a while for researchers to come clean on what I suspected years ago.

True, I haven't run into a virus in years. I do run into trojans and other malware now and then. AVG stopped a couple of drive-by attacks recently on a website that didn't seem terribly risky.

Once again, you have exaggerated. Researchers have found security flaws in some AVs so far, not all of them, and once found they were quickly fixed. Security flaws are often found in browsers, although security is of great concern there as well. I guess you have stopped using browsers because they increase your risk of malware infection.

[ackboo]

I haven't run an AV in years. Who are these people that still get viruses in 2016?

It can happen to anyone, now infected machines are a business so you don't really notice that something is wrong while your pc is sending forged packets to a victim of a DDOS attack. Or you don't really notice the keylogger grabbing all it can about you.
The worst that can happen is a remote code execution vulnerability, such as this one in firefox.
http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1032171
Or this one in chrome.
http://securitytracker.com/id/1034801
An antivirus is not bulletproof but it remains useful and is a part of a good security workflow.

[SameSelf]

ff/noscript/adblock/imager ftw

[ackboo]

But what happens when one of the whitelisted website starts serving malware, do you verify the checksums and digital signature of everything you install, is that dll you found on a forum really safe, are you the only one using your computer, how do you know you didn't overlook something at 3am on a friday morning.

[usually_quiet]

NoScript isn't perfect. http://techreport.com/news/28570/noscript-vulnerability-allows-malicious-scripts-to-run-unchecked

[SameSelf]

image guys

[Baldrick]

Virustotal.com

[usually_quiet]

image guys

...and how do you know the image is not infected if you did not run a malware scanner before imaging?

[Poppa_Meth]

Running Windows without active protection is not a good idea. There are way too many vulnerabilities in the Windows OS. As others have said, just because you haven't noticed you are infected doesn't mean you aren't. These days most of my scans find adware tracking cookies if anything, but on occasion a piece of trusted software (IMGBurn..cough..cough) will slip new crapware into their installer. Or a website will hit you with a drive by infection from a banner ad.

I use Avast on all my Windows rigs, but only install the core components. The AV, the Web Shield, and Mail Shield. I also turn off most sounds and set the delay for most popups down to a few seconds so they don't stay on screen long. I don't have a problem with the occasional ad they pop up. They have to generate revenue somewhere and they aren't all that intrusive.

Avira and Bitdefender are the the other free ones I always see recommended. Both of them are good but more prone to false positives in my experience. So far Avast is doing well for me.

[SameSelf]

image guys

...and how do you know the image is not infected if you did not run a malware scanner before imaging?

Simple. My image is has never even sniffed the interwebs. Why does this even need an explanation?

drive by infection from a banner ad.

what's a banner ad? this isn't the 90s

[Poppa_Meth]

Plenty of banner ads still out there. You realize that just indicates a format right? I run adblockers so I never see them myself but there are still components to some of them that load in the background. It was just last year that Yahoo ads were infected for nearly a week before anyone noticed all the damage they were doing.

http://digiday.com/brands/yahoo-ads-infected-malware-nearly-week-anyone-noticed/

[usually_quiet]

image guys

...and how do you know the image is not infected if you did not run a malware scanner before imaging?

Simple. My image is has never even sniffed the interwebs. Why does this even need an explanation?

It is still possible to have infected software installed. ...which you won't know about because you are not scanning for malware.

[SameSelf]

There are two kinds of users in the world. Those who get malware and those who don't. The latter group has many users like myself who ditched AV years ago. I recommend you do a serious audit of your computing habits if you find yourself in the former group. Google is your friend.

[SameSelf]

image guys

...and how do you know the image is not infected if you did not run a malware scanner before imaging?

Simple. My image is has never even sniffed the interwebs. Why does this even need an explanation?

It is still possible to have infected software installed. ...which you won't know about because you are not scanning for malware.

I guess some concepts are beyond your grasp. I feel sorry for you.

[usually_quiet]

There are two kinds of users in the world. Those who believe that they are completely immune from malware attacks by virtue of being more clever than everyone else and those who are wise enough to realize that nobody is that smart.

[SameSelf]

And then there are those who run AV, believe they immune from malware attacks, get them anyway, think the rest of the world is as stupid as they are, and spread FUD.

[usually_quiet]

And then there are those who run AV, believe they immune from malware attacks, get them anyway, think the rest of the world is as stupid as they are, and spread FUD.

Who are these imaginary people? Nobody in this thread ever claimed that AV software is fool-proof. It is just one line of defense among several.

However one person here (you) is spreading FUD, by claiming that prudent user behavior and running a few browser plug-ins is so effective that looking for malware is unnecessary, and security software offering real-time protection is a scam.

[OneIron]

In addition to Symantec AV (free from Comcast), I use OpenDNS on my router to block dodgy sites. Anyone who uses my wireless will receive a "Blocked by administrator" message if they try to visit blacklisted sites. Very effective...


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[hudsonf]

All these years I've been wasting my money on Eset Smart Security. If I don't look for a virus on my computer I won't find a virus on my computer. If I don't find a virus on my computer than no virus exist on my computer. All that money I wasted when all I had to do was stop looking.

[sophisticles]

The best anti-virus is...Linux. Yes I said it!

I've switched to using Korora 23, a Fedora respin, with SELinux enabled and I have been tried pummelling it by going to every questionable site I can think of, including ones that are known to host malicious files that attempt to highjack your pc and interestingly enough SE Linux seems to be doing it's job, I have gotten a few notifications that it prevented access to certain files or folders and I can tell you that from the standard account it locks the system down pretty tight, requiring root authentication before allowing actions and even more interesting, Korora ships with a driver manager called Pharlap (which works pretty well, better than the driver managers in Ubuntu based distros) and Korora prevented me from making driver changes if I'm logged in as root, do to security concerns, it wasn't until I logged in as a standard user that I was able to enable support for all my hardware such as audio and gpu acceleration.

Bottom line the best way to avoid malware, trojans, spyware, viruses and all that other crap out there is to use a SE Linux enabled distro or at the very least an AppArmor enabled distro.

[sophisticles]

and security software offering real-time protection is a scam.

I actually tend to agree with the last part, security software on Windows desktop is snake oil. I ran an experiment once where I installed Win 8.1, had the Windows antivirus running, antivir with the settings turned to high, spybot, malware bytes anti-exploit tool (which is supposed to stop zero day threats), the Windows firewall with the settings maxed and EMET with the settings maxed.

Then I decided to see how resilient it was virus attacks so I downloaded a bunch of "cracks" and ran them. Spybot, Malware Bytes, the Windows antivirus, and antivir all claimed to have detected and cleaned various viruses and trojans (interestingly enough they all detected different infections from the same tested cracking software) but monitoring the system for cpu and ram usage and sniffing packets with WireShark confirmed that the system was still infected and communicating with remote servers; in one case the system got hit with ransom ware that preceded to try and start encrypting files on my hard drive and perhaps the toughest virus of all was one where it would pin the mouse pointer to the upper left hand corner of the screen if you tried to launch task manager or the start menu. Basically you could move the mouse around but the moment you tried to launch the start menu or click on any icon in the task bar or try to launch task manager from teh task bar or by using the 3 finger salute the mouse pointer would glue itself to the upper left hand corner of the screen and nothing you could do other than a hard reboot via power button.

Real nasty virus, don't know what else it did but it defied all attempts to clean the system, nothing but a clean install would clean it.

There is some really nasty malware out there for Windows, I just can't bring myself to use a Windows pc to do any sort of personal computing, like banking or taxes or bill paying, at the very least I recommend to everyone to use a Linux distro that can run in live-usb mode to perform tasks where you will be exposing sensitive personal information.

[fritzi93]

No AV here. I run a VM (Virtual Machine). The base OS is (almost) never online.

With a VM, you don't even have to image it; just copy its folder (in the root of the OS drive) to somewhere else. If the VM gets screwed, delete the folder and copy your backup back to the root of the OS drive and restart the VM. It's a minimal install just for going online, so restoring it is only a matter of a minute or two.

I do run on demand scanners from time to time, such as MBAM and SAS. The base OS is always clean; the VM accumulates junk, mostly tracking cookies, though occasionally something nastier. I don't bother with trying to scrub the nasty stuff and merely restore the VM.

The base OS and the VM have a couple shared folders for downloads. Those folders get scanned more frequently.

I sympathise with cornemuse. I was never happy with any of the free AV suites. Anyway, there you go, that's one possibility. I don't think there's a perfect option.

[usually_quiet]

I agree that a VM is not a bad option, and that scanning for malware is a reasonable precaution even so. I already suggested in a different thread that cornemuse might run older Windows releases as a VM. This is another good reason to try one.

[fritzi93]

VMware player is free. You install it, start it up and go through the normal Windows install routine. The player itself is in your programs folder, but your OS install is in its own folder at the root of your C drive. So you can delete that folder at will and restore a backup when necessary.

Dunno how the MS VM works, but I presume it's similar.

I should add that I have a router with firewall as well. I'm not at all careful and the VM does pick up something (besides tracking cookies) very occasionally. Rarely, but it does. Even then, MBAM and SAS can usually fix it. But on the very rare occasions I've had to restore the VM folder backup, it's been a blessing to be able to do it so effortlessly.

My experience with AV is so out of date as to be nearly worthless, but I used Avast for quite a while. That was okay until later versions got rather clunky. AVG before that, same thing. Tried Avira, but it was always nagging me to upgrade.

Anyway, good luck.