Is paying for antivirus a waste of money?

Consider this: It is in the anti-virus industry's best interests that virus's, etc, all the nasty electronic crap, does NOT go away.

-c-

cornemuse said:

Consider this: It is in the anti-virus industry's best interests that virus's, etc, all the nasty electronic crap, does NOT go away.

-c-

Some of those electronic nasties...
...stole "secrets" from antivirus companies
...created government back doors (which lowered sales)
...got past AV tools (cost overhead with customer service calls)
...caused AV tools to crash computers (which lowered sales).

So -- it is in the antivirus industry's best interest that simplistic viruses do not go away. The really nasty ones hurt revenue


I generally install the free ones for those that I support.

I've concluded that it's a waste of time to read the latest review from PC Mag et al. Of course they are going to talk up the "best free antivirus." After all, the freebies hope you will upgrade. I'm sticking to MSE. There is no paid version to bother you with. I also think this is why they don't rate highly. No one makes any money off it. And yet, I keep reading that it does a good job. I've yet to hear of someone getting a terrible virus with it. (I'm sure someone will attempt to prove me wrong...).

Not know if someone else will have been aware of this safety hazard that affected important pages : Large advertising-based cyberattack hit BBC, New York Times, MSN | PCWorld

I read that Eset has protection against ransomware , but I do not know if it is aware of the attack and is ready to handle it. The other AV will offer the same solution ?

The only site I visited was Msn but the version of my country :S

michael diemer said:

I've concluded that it's a waste of time to read the latest review from PC Mag et al. Of course they are going to talk up the "best free antivirus." After all, the freebies hope you will upgrade. I'm sticking to MSE. There is no paid version to bother you with. I also think this is why they don't rate highly. No one makes any money off it. And yet, I keep reading that it does a good job. I've yet to hear of someone getting a terrible virus with it. (I'm sure someone will attempt to prove me wrong...).

I'm not going to attempt to prove you wrong. I still install MSE for some users that I support, but I install Panda for other users. It depends on the user.

Some time when you are bored...
...let my posts to this old thread put you to sleep

The link above states the issue. This post shows that issue via videos. Sadly, MSE still has poor heuristics despite Microsoft's OS telemetry. Perhaps it is light on resources because it does so little :-(

3Colors said:

Not know if someone else will have been aware of this safety hazard that affected important pages : Large advertising-based cyberattack hit BBC, New York Times, MSN | PCWorld

I read that Eset has protection against ransomware , but I do not know if it is aware of the attack and is ready to handle it. The other AV will offer the same solution ?

The only site I visited was Msn but the version of my country :S

Thanks for posting that link. I had not come across it yet.

It is just like the web-ad problems that Yahoo served up for weeks at a time all thru 2014.

CryptoPrevent should help stop some (most?) ransomware.
Be aware of this issue.

Malwarebytes anti-exploit and Hostsman should help too.


Most of these ad-based infections use Flash. I don't have Flash in IE (64bit) or Pale Moon (64bit). For websites where I need Flash, I use Chrome. Chrome handles updating it built in Pepper Flash well.

BorisTheAnimal said:

I only use Panda Free.

Should I have more?

It would be interesting to ask the staff at Panda if they already do everything that CryptoPrevent and Malwarebytes anti-exploit already does. I'm not fond of having so many tiny/specialized apps to keep up with.