What's the Best Anti-virus?

ICit2lol said:

COMPUTIAC said:

Looking over the Avast forum site today, a lot of the posters are switching to Bitdefender.

Yep well I have tested the free Bitdefender and it is light and good except for a few naggy pop ups.:)

just installed it on a non-essential system to give it a try. If any of you see a responsible article re: serious testing on BD, I'd like to read it so please post link.

some of you who have also used avast recently may have seen what, to me, was one of the "last straws" - any/most/all website downloads triggered the shield, and the timer was such that one could not intervene quickly enough to keep the legit website from being blacklisted, resulting in remediation of AVAST to unlist.
at least in this case they admit the error are trying to do cleanup.
What this tells me is that the team's Software Dev Process has gone lax. That level of miscode should have never made it TO the Beta stage, must less out in the wild. Something is amiss in the org.
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=143211.0

A Guy said:

I have no issues with Avast, it protects me, when I scan I hit the full scan button. Once I configured it, I could care less what the interface looks like. A Guy

zapp22 said:

some of you who have also used avast recently may have seen what, to me, was one of the "last straws" - any/most/all website downloads triggered the shield, and the timer was such that one could not intervene quickly enough to keep the legit website from being blacklisted, resulting in remediation of AVAST to unlist.
at least in this case they admit the error are trying to do cleanup.
What this tells me is that the team's Software Dev Process has gone lax. That level of miscode should have never made it TO the Beta stage, must less out in the wild. Something is amiss in the org.
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=143211.0

I started to make a post in response to A Guy's post to point out that AVAST, BitDefender free and Panda Cloud did not detect two infected files that have been in the wild since 20 Dec. More important than me finding a couple of files that get by these 3 tools is the fact that AVAST broke virustotal.com. Pressing the scan button does nothing in IE11 with 64bit tabs (EPM). You have to lower IE's security settings by turning EPM off to get the virustotal scan button to work. The AVAST plugins are listed as 32bit and 64bit. They should work with EPM turned on. That said, it is tough to write these plug-ins. I feel for the staff.

I aborted my post when virustotal went down - thus I could not post a link to the scans of the infected files. (I also needed to go to sleep - so I opted not use an alternate scanning service like Jotti.)

A Guy said:

...But install it and the latest Secunia PSI on those trouble friends PCs you end up cleaning every month, and maybe they'd at least stay up to date and virus free.

A Guy

The non-profits that I support get infected the most. Bitdefender's EULA seems to allow their free version to be installed it such settings. Although, this part of the EULA seems to have lost something in the translation:

[QUOTE]THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY WITH THIS PRODUCT. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE.[/QUOTE]

However, Bitdefender automatically sends suspicious files to its servers in Romainia. I'm not sure that I could get the organizations to go for that. We'll just stick with letting the NSA have all of our docs

andrew129260 said:

~~~
@username issues

Is there any AV you tested with your own self tests that seem to be good? What do you use? I know about the company sep, but what do you actually use?
Curious on your thoughts.

I only use SEP since I only use company supplied computers. I don't test the infected files that I find against SEP since the data logs are analyzed by my employer... so, I cannot comment on how well it detects stuff. I can say that SEP still has a few false positives that I can't get them to stop quarantining and we are not allowed to exclude files from SEP.

A simplistic way to look at the question "Is a tool good?" is:
Does it break stuff you need?
Do you get infected while "protected"?

Unfortunately, I must also pay attention to the EULA. Most home users don't have to read them too carefully. I'm still installing MSE for others for now. It does not break the stuff that they use.

To me, it is important to not break stuff. I encourage my uses to use virustotal before installing stuff, so I would not install AVAST until they stop breaking virustotal.