Switching Security Solutions

I have done the process of elimination while doing research. I'm either going to go with Trend Micro Titanium 2012 products or AVG 2012 products...

codyw said:

I have done the process of elimination while doing research. I'm either going to go with Trend Micro Titanium 2012 products or AVG 2012 products...

FYI,
I had Trend Micro {paid} installed prior to switching to AVG.
Uninstalling same - & locating the remnants remaining - proved to be extremely tedious & time consuming here.
Their support IMHO left much to be desired.
{An anecdotal survey of one.....of course!}

Hmm, interesting stuff about Trend. Well, I have a little "setup" currently setup. I have Trend Micro Max Security 2012 and also have the free COMODO Firewall running alongside. It catches malware too upon entering the computer. If it misses it, then it's up to Trend's defenses. I tested my theory on this on my testing PC and it did OK.

codyw said:

Hmm, interesting stuff about Trend. Well, I have a little "setup" currently setup. I have Trend Micro Max Security 2012 and also have the free COMODO Firewall running alongside. It catches malware too upon entering the computer. If it misses it, then it's up to Trend's defenses. I tested my theory on this on my testing PC and it did OK.

Keep us posted.

Off topic & a curiosity question....
Have you ever considered using the inbuilt Windows firewall? {used in conjunction with a good router firewall}

I've used the Windows Firewall when I first started out with Windows a long time ago. It's clunky and hard to use in my opinion. That's why when I was thinking of multi-layer security, I thought of COMODO's firewall which catches most malware upon entry. If it gets past its behavioral and sandbox analysis, then the security product would (hopefully) catch the threat. On my testing PC, AVG and COMODO combined did well. I was surprised when I ran an anti-rootkit scan at the end that it found many! On the other hand, Trend 2012 did OK too. With its behavior blocker set to hypersensitive, and COMODO set to block all unknown attacks for both AVG & Trend tests, Trend did OK. It would have done poorly without COMODO's help because COMODO blocked a lot of stuff before Trend responded.

The one thing I am not liking about Trend is: I posted on their community forums today where to send malware samples to and no one has answered it. Surprisingly, I don't see many posts/topics about that question. Surely they have an email address or website you can send or upload the samples to, but maybe not!

@Codyw - I believe (at least in past versions of trend, there is a built in mechanism (i don't remember a button, a checkbox somewhere?) that allows automatic sending of the nicely packaged and encrypted sample to the lab for analysis (with reply). it is available when the detection occurs.

And maybe I missed a page or two, but how exactly are you testing your test computer once its set-up and ready?

@ICit2lol - Hey now, AVG had it's heyday, can't remember how many years it's been, 5 maybe, it was pretty much top dog in my research (and I'm not talking PC mags, but big-boy grownup tests with controls and statistical significance (via: chi square tests) and across-the-board it detected with the highest efficacy of any (I believe at the time it was about one of the only ones that even detected like 4 out of the 5 tested key-loggers, whereas maybe 1-2 other apps found 1 each.... (for instance) Then I installed it for years on clients computers and dropped my guard for 4 years or so and went back to the stats only to find the bottom fell out at some point (maybe day 2 maybe the day before I reexamined it ? who knows?) But spot-on crap today! I call it "watchware", because it basically watches the infection enter, logs it, and reports it (even when set to del or encrypt or whatever) wonderful, only wish i could boot up to READ THE LOG! but, hey, you live, you learn.

Mike...out

I take my personal PC offline so nothing can infect it. I install a security solution on the test PC that I am wishing to test (usually a trial), and use URL's to real malware to see how well the suite can keep the PC clean. It seems the more people I talk to, the more tech savvy people like myself are doing it as a "hands-on" project to test a product's effectiveness, and then compare it to other competing products. For all of 2012 products out there so far, I have tests 19. Some had good results, and some had bad. Then I log each test in a Word document for my own documentation.