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Do I really need an anti-virus?
Kato
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Several years ago, I was an avid pc gamer. I kept up with all the latest hardware and software technology that I could. I built my own pc a few different times as well. That was a good 8 to 10 years ago to be honest. Since then, I have kept up with some thing, but not all. I don't have the time I used to have to stay on top and I stopped building my own pc's. I have a desktop that is 4-5 years old and still works great for anything we need it to do and it has all the proper security that is needed. We are on a network with a wireless router for the firewall. I have a netbook that I picked up a little over a month ago. It is a Dell Mini 9 and I love it. I am the only one using it. I currently have Avast on it, but I am questioning the need for it.
Like I said, I am the only one that uses this netbook. I do not use facebook or myspace. I rarely use MSN Live Messenger on it and when I do, I know who I am talking too. I don't just accept anything and talk to anyone. I rarely search porn and when I do, it is just one site in particular and it doesn't even have videos. I rarely download music in any way either. I do have Vuze on here, but I have downloaded and entire 2 songs since I got this netbook. I have a large library of music I like on my external drive and just rarely download new music. I use gmail for my mail. I don't get too many forwards and they are generally from family or trusted people. I tend to get my mail, play some music (web radio is awesome), play a few games from my jump drive, surf the web and read the news or penny arcade or a few other forums and I consider myself to be a pretty knowledgable person when it comes to being savvy on the computer and internet. In short, I am not an idiot and do not click on everything and if I install something, I do custom installs and read about it first and don't install bogus toolbars and other stupid software/spyware.
So with that said...do I really need to keep Avast on my system? How many people out here keep an active anti-virus running on their machine?
Edit: Oh..and I use firefox with adblock for my surfing.
Like I said, I am the only one that uses this netbook. I do not use facebook or myspace. I rarely use MSN Live Messenger on it and when I do, I know who I am talking too. I don't just accept anything and talk to anyone. I rarely search porn and when I do, it is just one site in particular and it doesn't even have videos. I rarely download music in any way either. I do have Vuze on here, but I have downloaded and entire 2 songs since I got this netbook. I have a large library of music I like on my external drive and just rarely download new music. I use gmail for my mail. I don't get too many forwards and they are generally from family or trusted people. I tend to get my mail, play some music (web radio is awesome), play a few games from my jump drive, surf the web and read the news or penny arcade or a few other forums and I consider myself to be a pretty knowledgable person when it comes to being savvy on the computer and internet. In short, I am not an idiot and do not click on everything and if I install something, I do custom installs and read about it first and don't install bogus toolbars and other stupid software/spyware.
So with that said...do I really need to keep Avast on my system? How many people out here keep an active anti-virus running on their machine?
Edit: Oh..and I use firefox with adblock for my surfing.
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I've never run anti-virus software myself, and have never had a machine infected. It's mostly an idiot shield.
I'm similar to this, except I do use torrents and I've never had a virus or spyware, except that one time I did something really stupid but that was my own stupid fault.
It's basically about smart browsing, and from the sound of your post Kato, you browse/install smartly, so you're okay not to use one.
While I don't disagree with your statement, the bolded part is kinda funny to me. How do you know you're not infected if you don't run an anti-virus software. Are you Neo and can feel if your computer is sick?
Because if you honestly think that "olol I don't get infected I practice safe internet" then honestly, you're probably the one with the botnet running on your machine that you don't even know about.
99% of all malware now is specifically designed to hide from the user and do it's work in the background. The only people who think they dont' get Viruses(virii?) are the naive ones.
I run scans every week, and probably see something more dangerous than a tracking cookie about once every 2 months, and I practice safe internet.
For those that do not have an anti-virus installed and you say you scan your pc about once a week, what are you using to scan your pc? Are you installing and updating the AV program and then uninstalling after you scan?
No matter how adept you think you are, everyones going to get a virus eventually.
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Though I'm considering installing anti-virus and setting it up to be hands-off except when scanning. I've found this comparison of AV products: it seems to indicate that Symantec is my best bet for effective AV that won't bother me much. Does anyone know if it's easy to turn off its real-time protection?
Do not get Symantec under any circumstance, last time I bought their Internet Security suite, my computer slowed to a fucking crawl, and I had to uninstall when there was no way to fix it. $70 down the toilet...this was around 3 years ago when Symantic software were notorius system hogs (didn't read the reviews before I bought the box at retail). They may have improved it for this year or not, but I know I'll never go back to them.
Then I ran a virus scan on a lark one day. I have over 40 on my computer.
You should at least be running avast or something. This is like saying it's okay for you to drive down the highway without a seatbelt on because you stay in the slow lane, signal all your turns and merge onto the offramp lane 1000 yards before you get to it, which will do nothing for all the other people driving around you.
Also it doesn't matter how Neo you are, every single browser and OS has at least one known exploit at any time. There's already a botnet made solely out of Macs out there.
Just download avast, install it, and let it do it's thing.
Speaking of, what's yer IP address? I uh.... need to check umm... something. Important. For you.
You won a car. That's it. I need your IP address to verify that you won this car here so I .. uh... we.. um... the company I totally represent that is completely legit can deliver this car. To you. At your internet address.
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Limited accounts won't save you.
You are of course right that a non-admin account won't save your data if malware decides to do something nefarious with it, but you really should have backups of that regardless. :P
It's very easy to just look at your process tree, and anything so malicious that it wouldn't show up in the tree would probably be noticeable in other ways, aka computer not working.
I haven't used an anti-virus in 4 years and I've never had problems.
We're at the point now where if you are on anything Win XP SP2 or higher then as long as you are not going to the most salacious sites in existence, you're not going to get jacked.
Well. Also you shouldn't use Outlook. Outlook is poison.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
While I may have AV installed, I never have it on. Usually I'll just scan suspicious files manually. I've certainly been infected a few times, but have usually ended up removing the virus manually though, not via software.
But more often than not, my experience with AV is that it'll do false positives.
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Show me. Now you have me curious.
Name one. Both Avast and AVG are complete hogs that have had an immediately noticeable performance impact on every computer I have installed them on.
AVG 8 especially. Jesus christ it is worse than fucking Norton.
My university required computers on the network to run Symantec, and it was fairly invisible, but it was also fairly useless. I was being a moron once and clicked on a virus and all it did was tell me I was infected. Couldn't remove it, and couldn't even point me to non-confusing instructions for removing it.
nod32
edit: oh sorry, missed the free. Apparently it's like the standard engineering dilemma: good, low-resource, free. pick any 2
For what it's worth I just installed Avira AntiVir and had it do a full scan of my system. It found exactly one issue: a program called cmdow that I intentionally have installed. I'm not quite convinced the lack of an antivirus will lead to unavoidable malware infestations of doom.
I won't ever claim these systems are immune to invulnerabilities, they aren't. But Linux runs on 1% of all computers on the planet. I don't know what OS X's numbers are but I guarantee you a huge chunk of that remaining 99% is Windows.
Benefit of being a minority, you're "safe". Windows is such a big, easy target no one bothers to put the effort into attacking anything else.
PC Tools & Comodo depending on what you install and you're settings.
Best part about Comodo is that it auto updates even with UAC enabled.
I find that part about Vista & Win7 a bit hard to believe. Since standard user accounts need to enter an admin screen name & password just like Linux.
http://www.withinwindows.com/2009/02/04/windows-7-auto-elevation-mistake-lets-malware-elevate-freely-easily/
it's already been stated that this is not going to be fixed in the release version.
Other exploits can be found if you know where to look, this one is just the most obvious.
Be sure to check the image path when you do though, as malware will sometimes use the process names of common system processes (svchost.exe is a good one, as you'll generally have multiple genuine svchost processes running anyway.).
Are you sure they didn't fix that? I thought that they had. I'll have to play around with the RC today I guess. In any case, I saw this in the comments section: This would seem to support my argument...
As for exploits, I also mentioned staying up to date on security patches. Sure, there will be at times exploits in the wild before a patch is available, but if you're following other advice you will hopefully be safe until a patch is available. There is usually a way to mitigate risk (for example, turning off Javascript in Adobe Reader or not using a specific web browser until an issue is fixed).
Man, I'm running AVG 8 right now and it's not making a lick of difference, performance-wise. XP SP3 (formerly SP2, no difference). I play games with it running and everything, it's never interfered with a single thing.
Maybe I'm just lucky or something, though.
Nonetheless, I'm only running it as a token measure. Most of the time, especially with newer installs, I hardly every bother with AV. As long as it's not using my machine to zombie around cp, slowing things down or annoying me.... eh, I just don't care too much. Granted, I'm also in linux half the time.
Edit: Er, I guess I'm running 8.5 as of a few days ago. Still, no difference.
It's nothing but a shakedown for those pour souls who had AVG installed for them by the geek squad of the kid next door. I suppose profiting off their ignorance is ok if it means free antivirus for the rest of us. In a way, it's like someone is doing my job for me.
Yeah but I'm planning to run with real-time protection off and their system had the second highest scanning throughput.
AV causes the same sort of issues unless you buy Symantec corporate Anti-Virus, and if you're going to pay money, you'd might as well buy Nod32 or BitDefender, software that's actually useful without being resource intensive or intrusive.
I am looking for something to run locally for regular scans, rather than real-time protection.
And seriously, fuck Norton. I went through hours of hell trying to help my mom over the phone and in person with what ended up being a false positive while Norton kept shitting all over everything because of it. I've since nuked Norton and installed NOD32 on her laptop as well.
Eh well Nod32 had twice the false positives of Symantec and Bitdefender had 4 times the false positives, both having lower detection rates. Are you saying there's no option to turn off real-time protection on Symantec? Because I don't see how it can be a resource hog when I turn it off and tell it to do something every once in a while.
The runas command is the windows equivalent of su on nix.
Also, in the past there were plenty of ways to elevate outside of a limited account. MS have fixed those but one for example was going into scheduled tasks and setting it to run cmd.exe or explorer.exe. They'd be run with SYSTEM privileges, essentially greater than Administrator privileges.. great eh? MS fixed that one so it prompts the user who to run the task/program as. (for example enter username and password to run this process as)
Essentially by running cmd.exe or explorer.exe with SYSTEM privileges any other programs launched through those processes would inherit the same user privileges.
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