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yankeeharp
March 17th, 2011, 05:01 AM
Hi, all,

What is the current wisdom on low-cost anti-virus on a non-mission-critical computer?

It seems most viruses these days just want your credit card number or a pathway to do something anonymously somewhere else. If you're not going to buy things with plastic online, could you get away without an av?

Are there any websites that you can go to online to do an av check if you don't want to buy an av? Any good free av's that you recommend?

Thanks.

Peace and love,
Charlotte

Dan in Saint Louis
March 17th, 2011, 08:23 PM
Free Avira: http://www.avira.com/en/avira-free-antivirus

You can check the effectiveness of various antivirus programs at
http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/. Click "Main
Tests" and then the couple of most recent results. I'm using the free
version of Avira and it seems to have little effect on the speed of
other programs (non-intrusive).

A good malware defense is Malwarebytes http://www.malwarebytes.org (http://www.malwarebytes.org/).

Secunia PSI helps you keep track of the security level of your programs
(whether any security patches have been issued by the publisher).
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

Total cost of the three above = $0.00.

Spam is a whole separate issue and requires a separate approach. It
ought to filtered out by your email host, but if they are doing a poor
job the filters in Thunderbird are quite effective.

Peter Creasey
March 19th, 2011, 10:30 AM
Any good free av's that you recommend?

Charlotte, I still like AVG Free without the Link Scanner and the AVG tray.

davidh
March 19th, 2011, 11:41 AM
The free Panda Cloud AntiVirus has ranked at or near the top among free anti malware programs according to tests for detection rate (more or less the ability to detect a wide range of malware) done by PC Magazine for about the last two years. I use it as a resident (on access and always on) malware scanner.

I also use Malwarebytes and Ad-Aware as 'on demand' scanners, once in a while, e.g. when I happen to visit a web site that happens to prompt a security warning from my browser or any of the other extra security software I have always loaded and running, 'just in case'.

Secunia PSI is not a malware scanner per se, but it is probably the best free consumer oriented tool to make sure that your Windows computer does not have any out of date software with known security holes installed on the computer. Not updating third party (i.e. non-Microsoft) programs to patch security holes is probably the main type of vulnerability that criminals exploit.

I would think that any conscientious person would still want to install anti-malware program(s) on their computer, even if there were absolutely zero private data of any value to anyone on the computer. For example, who would consciously think of allowing bad guys to surreptitiously install spamming software, child porn distributing software, distributed denial of service attack software against legitimate business and charity concerns, etc. onto their computer. Even if one were completely innocent, the authorities would be both legally and morally obligated to track down and investigate ALL public AND private computers (either with or sometimes without search warrants) being used for criminal and terrorist purposes.

A couple years ago I legitimately downloaded and installed a legitimate piece of free software from a legitimate web site, but unfortunately the web site had been attacked and infiltrated by Vietnamese communists and the software was infected with malware to attack some human rights web sites. Unfortunately my anti-malware at the time did not detect the infection. Reason was that the particular malware was quite new and therefore a number of anti-malware companies had not developed detection signatures for the malware. It takes a lot of effort for the good guys to even begin to try to keep up with the bad guys. That's one reason why it may be a good idea to read a couple different reviews of anti-malware programs or suites, to get an idea of which companies are doing a good job in this race against evil.

davidh
March 20th, 2011, 02:03 PM
Charlotte, I still like AVG Free without the Link Scanner and the AVG tray.
I used AVG (free) a lot in the past. I don't have any particular complaints about it that I can remember. IIRC it has rated OK or better in some reviews.

I switched to Panda Cloud Antivirus (free) as my main anti-malware program. Because it supposedly has a higher detection rate and supposedly eats fewer hardware resources. However, I DO use the AVG Linkscanner in conjunction with / together with Panda. As I understand it, AVG Linkscanner checks web pages and web links live in realtime for suspicious scripting (javascript). And as I further understand it, such checking has somewhat of an advantage in that suspicious activity/exploits are stopped BEFORE the infected file per se actually arrives as one's PC. When I say 'file', of course, I am referring to files OTHER than an actual web page (HTML file) itself which may already be at least partially rendered and already appearing on the monitor display within the browser. AVG Linkscanner works as an add on within both MS IE and Firefox, plus it also apparently has a separate EXE part that probably must monitor HTTP traffic to some extent.

I prefer AVG Linkscanner (free) to the McAfee SiteAdvisor (free) because the latter is NOT realtime and only gives info about sites as they were at some time in the hopefully recent past (AFAIK). AND I suspect that SiteAdvisor might give too many 'red' warnings (false positives), but I have not kept up with the merits of it so my opinion is not up to date.

Peter Creasey
March 23rd, 2011, 08:49 AM
David, The BIG problem with Link Scanner, in my view at least, is the high cost of processing overhead.

No thanks!

I'll just be careful what I link to.

davidh
March 23rd, 2011, 04:57 PM
David, The BIG problem with Link Scanner, in my view at least, is the high cost of processing overhead.

No thanks!

I'll just be careful what I link to. I never tried to measure the overhead. I'm kinda slow. Maybe that's why it doesn't bother me?

Your strategy is pretty good. Assuming that legitimate sites never get infected. Big assumption.

ndebord
March 23rd, 2011, 06:56 PM
Hi, all,

What is the current wisdom on low-cost anti-virus on a non-mission-critical computer?

It seems most viruses these days just want your credit card number or a pathway to do something anonymously somewhere else. If you're not going to buy things with plastic online, could you get away without an av?

Are there any websites that you can go to online to do an av check if you don't want to buy an av? Any good free av's that you recommend?

Thanks.

Peace and love,
Charlotte

Charlotte,

Two free anti-virus programs consistently get good ratings, although nothing does as well as paid IMO, such as NOD32.

Anti-Vir and Avast (the latter is what I use, the latest 6.0.0.100 version.

As for firewalls, I still use an old one, Outpost Free 2009. There is a free Outpost Suite that is new and still being tweaked imo. A new release is due out any day now. It includes its own anti-virus engine, which is not a big name engine and seems rather pedestrian. The good news is that IF you already have an anti-virus program up and running and decide to install the Suite, it will automatically defer to your already running program and not install its own anti-virus module.

Private Firewall, Online Armor and Outpost are my 3 favorites right now in firewalls.

davidh
March 23rd, 2011, 07:53 PM
... I prefer AVG Linkscanner (free) to the McAfee SiteAdvisor (free) because the latter is NOT realtime and only gives info about sites as they were at some time in the hopefully recent past (AFAIK). AND I suspect that SiteAdvisor might give too many 'red' warnings (false positives), but I have not kept up with the merits of it so my opinion is not up to date. FWIW,
AVG Linkscanner extension for Firefox does not yet work with the new version 4.0 of Firefox.

Since Linkscanner has already caught one or two apparent malwares while I was using my Firefox 3.6.x, I'll probably stick with the current Firefox until AVG (Grisoft) updates/upgrades their Firefox extension for Linkscanner.

yankeeharp
March 26th, 2011, 03:57 PM
Thanks to all. I think I will go with the AVG. I've got Firefox 3.6.16. I guess I should keep that. There is a way that this can be had as an extension of Firefox? I assume all will made clear when I download it -- not for a couple months. Thanks again.

davidh
March 26th, 2011, 05:04 PM
Thanks to all. I think I will go with the AVG. I've got Firefox 3.6.16. I guess I should keep that. There is a way that this can be had as an extension of Firefox? I assume all will made clear when I download it -- not for a couple months. Thanks again.I uninstalled Firefox 4.0 and went back to Firefox 3.6.16 so that I could use AVG LinkScanner 2011. I am rather much of a nervous Nellie and am not so bold and impatient that I can't wait for web pages to load a little slower, in the hope that I will be less likely to be attacked by legitimate but possibly compromised web pages of reputable enterprises.

I assume that AVG will sooner or later enhance AVG 2011 so that it works nicely with Firefox 4.0. Until that time, I will probably stick with Firefox 3.6.x.

Mozilla (Firefox and Thunderbird) will very likely continue to put out security fixes for version 3.6.x for a period of time, so there is little if any risk security wise in sticking with Firefox 3.6.x.

If one is going to install AVG 2011, it is probably best to have Firefox already installed BEFORE installing AVG 2011.

davidh
March 26th, 2011, 05:27 PM
There is a way that this can be had as an extension of Firefox? If you have a version of Firefox that is currently compatible with the current version of AVG, then the installation of AVG will automatically install the required extension of Firefox into Firefox when you install AVG provided that Firefox is ALREADY installed at that time.

davidh
March 30th, 2011, 01:32 PM
Thanks to all. I think I will go with the AVG. I've got Firefox 3.6.16. I guess I should keep that. There is a way that this can be had as an extension of Firefox? I assume all will made clear when I download it -- not for a couple months. Thanks again. Today, my AVG LinkScanner program notified me that it had updated itself. I made a guess that this update might include a fix so it will run as an extension under Firefox 4.0.
In fact that turned out to be true. The latest AVG LinkScanner seems to work fine with Firefox 4.0. So I assume that the full blown AVG 2011 also will be fine with Firefox 4.0.

FWIW, after I updated to Firefox 4.0 there also turned out to be a new version of FireFTP that will run with Firefox 4.0. No concern to you unless you want to do File Transfers from within your Firefox. I don't think that FireFTP supports SecureFTP. I don't need that now, but I already have FileZilla for that in case I ever need it.