What's the Best Anti-virus?

yes they can and are. poorguy

guess it just comes down as to how well one pays attention to what is being downloaded. i have also been tricked by hidden add ons. seems everyone has there on tool bar they want you to load. the adwcleaner wanted to down load a tool bar and stated that it would not worl properly if i didn't however i did have the option to disable it once i ran the program. poorguy

the discussion tells me that this is about learned-behavior. still using these packages because they gave us warm fuzzies in the past, the elusion of security. I work on a lot of systems, and have used avast a lot in the past [no more] - I have gone back into such 2 years later to disinfect from things that slipped past avast [as well as the other popular packages]. 'tis true that the human is the best and worst part of the security apparatus. "AV" is a misnomer, as we all know. classical 'viruses' are not much of a threat. the most malicious types of code out in the wild will get past all these defenses, as recent events have shown again. but, the most sophisticated code is not really aimed at causing mayhem for the underlings - they are aimed at the corporates. for the average small business or SOHO user of pc's [a shrinking universe now... imploding] the more aggravating "infections" are gray... adware, marketingware, interference-ware, redirect-ware, browser-ware, etc. we can't save people from themselves... if they go installing weather-apps and toolbars, they're going to pay me to cleanup. none of these packages will prevent that [except scotty, in a way, but that too is a learning curve and apt to just annoy the disinterested]

with win8 and win7, there is just no point in these aftermarket utilities and I do not trust the motives of the humans that are left holding the bag on those outdated products. they are susceptible to being "turned" by hefty cash payouts for blackhat meddlers. and I reiterate: you do NOT know what those packages are doing in the background.

there are comments all through this very long thread of this type: "I've used xyz av package for years and 'never had an issue' ". that's hardly a ringing endorsement. the one useful feature of any that has been effective many times has been Avast's look-ahead link detection. I wish all browsers would incorporate this type of technique. best I can tell, only Chrome does so effectively. but the price of Avasts intereference /spamming is too high. its just not a good end user util anymore. I expect many of these will either become marketingware over the next few years, or disappear, and poorly maintained.
think about it: would you put your best/brightest talent on these products, or where the action is in handsets?

zapp22 said:

the discussion tells me that this is about learned-behavior. still using these packages because they gave us warm fuzzies in the past, the elusion of security. I work on a lot of systems, and have used avast a lot in the past [no more] - I have gone back into such 2 years later to disinfect from things that slipped past avast [as well as the other popular packages]. 'tis true that the human is the best and worst part of the security apparatus. "AV" is a misnomer, as we all know. classical 'viruses' are not much of a threat. the most malicious types of code out in the wild will get past all these defenses, as recent events have shown again. but, the most sophisticated code is not really aimed at causing mayhem for the underlings - they are aimed at the corporates. for the average small business or SOHO user of pc's [a shrinking universe now... imploding] the more aggravating "infections" are gray... adware, marketingware, interference-ware, redirect-ware, browser-ware, etc. we can't save people from themselves... if they go installing weather-apps and toolbars, they're going to pay me to cleanup. none of these packages will prevent that [except scotty, in a way, but that too is a learning curve and apt to just annoy the disinterested]

with win8 and win7, there is just no point in these aftermarket utilities and I do not trust the motives of the humans that are left holding the bag on those outdated products. they are susceptible to being "turned" by hefty cash payouts for blackhat meddlers. and I reiterate: you do NOT know what those packages are doing in the background.

there are comments all through this very long thread of this type: "I've used xyz av package for years and 'never had an issue' ". that's hardly a ringing endorsement. the one useful feature of any that has been effective many times has been Avast's look-ahead link detection. I wish all browsers would incorporate this type of technique. best I can tell, only Chrome does so effectively. but the price of Avasts intereference /spamming is too high. its just not a good end user util anymore. I expect many of these will either become marketingware over the next few years, or disappear, and poorly maintained.
think about it: would you put your best/brightest talent on these products, or where the action is in handsets?

sounds as though you have invested interest. cut and dry pick an antivirus that works for you and use it. they are free and no complaints. they are all the same. they provide basic protection. that is all. i have had things slip by the great MSE to they are all the same none are any better than the rest. COMMON SENSE is the best antivirus that you can get. however no download can be found for it. only my opinion. thanks for the space. poorguy

zapp22 said:

~~~
there are comments all through this very long thread of this type: "I've used xyz av package for years and 'never had an issue' ". that's hardly a ringing endorsement. the one useful feature of any that has been effective many times has been Avast's look-ahead link detection.
~~~

When something flags a website, do you count that as a problem averted because you did not visit that website? How many of these websites were harmless - but flagged in error? If you found out that the false positive error rate was 85% - would you still consider it a good feature?

I'm not saying that the error rate is that high - I'm just saying that until you know the error rate and the economic impact of incorrectly flagging a website - then I'm not sure that you can say that this is a good feature. One errant flagging can take a webmaster months of labor to undo and the reputation damage is never totally undone.

hey UsernameIssues, what is your choice for antivirus and what do you use. just curious. i believe that all antivirus paid or free gives false positives. anytime i get a flag i look up what it is to see if it is something to be concerned about. i use avast free and avg free and i can say that avast does give me more false hits than avg does. i would rather have that than not but once i find out what the flag was for then i make the choice to allow or not. i also get flags on both when i download software from certain sites due to there added crap or download manager that they think you need. poorguy

When those running this forum announced that a field had been added in the My System Specs area for antivirus, I added that info

I use a laptop provided by my employer. That employer mandates that Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) be installed. I don't list a version number because it could change at any time without me knowing it. Updates are done silently. I'm pretty sure that the laptop came with SEP11, but now it has SEP12. SEP has not flagged any file as bad during the 3 years that I've had this laptop. Does that mean that SEP is not very good at catching things or does it mean that I'm good at not getting infected?

I have been installing Microsoft Security Essentials on computers that I support (you know: for family, friends and friends of friends). I've not seen any false positives on those computers; but I've seen less protection than I would like from MSE. I've moved one of my "clients" over to Panda Cloud Antivirus... but I really need to spend more time studying PCA before I move others to it or recommenced it. When troubleshooting problems on a computer, MSE is the way to go. I've only seen one app that failed to get along with MSE, but that was years ago. The app and MSE have both changed. They get along now.

I understand about false positives on files. I write/compile scripts (mostly using AutoIt). I have had my scripts flagged just because they are written in AutoIt and/or compressed using UPX. See this post. If you have used an app for years & now it is flagged as bad - you could surf to the vendor's website and see if they know about the issue or if they can explain things to your satisfaction.

If you had been visiting a website (like this one) for years... what would you do if your security app suddenly blocked or flagged it? Where could you go for info about what is going on? There is a real possibility that good websites (like this one) can get compromised and start infecting those that visit. So, you stay away*. You cannot surf to the website to see if there is an explanation. (e.g. is was a false positive or we have cleaned things up).

*okay, normal people stay away. Geeks like us might boot up a virtual machine and surf to the "infected site" anyway.

These negative website ratings are copied to hundreds of other website reputation systems in a matter of minutes. Some of those systems have no human to talk to about getting the reputation changed back to clean. It is a webmaster's nightmare.