Paid antivirus

[Tea]

"Cloud software" = synonym for "software rental" = synonym for "same product, different delivery" = synonym for "vast increase in profit expected" = synonym for "customers hate it, walk away in droves" = synonym for "Adobe are greedy barstardz and everybody knows it and what's more they are looking like very, very stupid greedy barstards now 'coz their customer base is melting away like an iceberg in the sun. "Anti-virus software "in the cloud" is just what happens when marketing droids at the anti-virus company read the sales forecsts at Adobe and decide to pull the same three card trick instead of reading the actual sales numbers and running a million miles away.

 

[LunarMist]

How does that cloud crap work when the computer is not connected to the internet?

 

[Tannin]

The same way as any other software works, Lunar. "Cloud" software is just ordinary software that phones home once in a while to make sure that you have paid the rental. Photoshop CC, for example, is the same product as Photoshop CS6 but it phones home every few months and you can't buy it, only rent it - at vastly higher cost than before.

 

[fb]

To Pandas defence I have to say that it seems to be pretty easy on hardware resources. And it's free for home use. But the general cloud theory seems to fit in quite well on their corporate products.

 

[Howell]

They crowd source discovery of new applications and threats. It makes a lot of sense.

 

[Chewy509]

Anyone used F-Secure recently? Finally getting around to removing MSE off systems, and actually get 5 licenses of F-Secure AV as part of my Internet connection bundle, so am considering trying F-Secure. Or is Avast Free still the way to go?

PS. F-Secure seems to get decent ratings in a number of those AV tests...

 

[Mercutio]

Avast just updated and completely changed its UI again. The Settings pages are most impacted, with a lot of the stuff that I care about changing now located under "Appearance", including the option to make it stop talking. However, the new version no longer makes 8.1 machines whine about app compatibility so I guess that's the point of the update.

I've not used the full F-secure product recently but they have a pretty nice rescue environment.

 

[Mercutio]

Apparently the new version of Avast can create a bootable disk. That's possibly useful.

 

[LunarMist]

There is an Avast toolbar in Outlook now. Even when disabled it reappears when Outlook is started every time. It's really annoying.

 

[Mercutio]

You can probably go in to the Add-ins Manager and tell Outlook not to trust content from AWIL software. Or something.
Or stop using Outlook, which I think is a fantastic idea on general principle.

 

[LunarMist]

What can I replace it with? I need to maintain emails locally in a pst or similar file.

 

[Mercutio]

Outlook is not unique in its ability to store a local copy of email messages. You could move to Thunderbird or Postbox.

 

[Chewy509]

Anyone used F-Secure recently? Finally getting around to removing MSE off systems, and actually get 5 licenses of F-Secure AV as part of my Internet connection bundle, so am considering trying F-Secure. Or is Avast Free still the way to go?

PS. F-Secure seems to get decent ratings in a number of those AV tests...

Replying to self... Have had F-Secure installed for just over 2 months and have removed it due to DNS client issues. From what I can tell, F-Secure hooks into the DNS client and on occasion will cause DNS lookups to fail for no apparent reason, but only for a single domain. eg, for 24 hours, my wife couldn't access www.google.com.au, but www.google.com would work perfectly fine. The next day, www.google.com.au works fine, but some other random domain name would fail. (All other tablets/phones/laptops/desktops could resolve the failing addresses fine). A reboot did not fix the name lookup either... After logging issues, contacting F-Secure, got no-where, so have removed their product off my wifes laptop. It now has Avast Free.

PS. My wifes laptop is running Windows 7 SP1, and is on a wired connection to the router.

 

[sedrosken]

I hadn't seen a machine with the current paid version of Avast (v7) until this weekend.

My grandma still uses it on her old P4 laptop (1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM). Holy carp. She says her PC is dead, and while she IS mostly correct, it'd run hella better if Avast wasn't hogging 98.4% of her RAM.

Dad used to use it, I did too. Now we all know better and really don't use anything. None of us keep anything essential on our computers, and Dad and I both have a copy of Kapersky on hold if things head south.

 

[pfrcom]

Is anyone else finding recent updates to free Avast have slowed computer down more than previous versions of free Avast, or is it just my imagination ?

Especially at Startup, there seems to be a lot of disk thrashing going on in the time when Avast's service would be starting

 

[Stereodude]

I only have Avast on one computer It has a SSD and I'm not real impressed with Avast.

 

[Mercutio]

I only have Avast on one computer It has a SSD and I'm not real impressed with Avast.

It's definitely heavier-weight than it used to be, but it's still lighter than Defender or Avira.
The tools are getting worse. I don't think that's your imagination.

 

[mubs]

OT, but thought it better to put it here.

MalwareBytes has released a free and paid version of Anti-Exploit.

 

[time]

Let me just cut to the chase, Malwarebytes is overrated and doesn't work. It couldn't scan its way out of a paper bag. We had an outbreak of a variant of shortcut virus that replicated itself, even when found and quarantined. Used Malwarebytes and the virus laughed at it like it was a stupid joke. Only two AVs successfully could remove the virus: Kaspersky and ESET Live CD.

Unfortunately, this reflects my experience, limited and anecdotal as it is. Except that Kaspersky also failed to detect a trojan on my work PC about a year ago.

It *appears* to me that tools like Malware Bytes are only useful once your resident anti-malware software has been compromised. And even then, I now use at least two standalone products in that situation - no single product is good enough.

 

[time]

<stupid double post bug>

 

[Mercutio]

As far as I know, there's no such thing as real-time malware removal. The only thing that paid versions of Malwarebytes do is update automatically. It's possible to immunize against known theats, which is why I install both Spybot and Spywareblaster and combine them with Adblock Plus on all installed browsers, but anything that says it will detect "malware-like activity" (e.g. Symantec and the product they called Threatfire) is basically lying. You either block a known threat or you remove after the fact. Malware programs are not viruses or worms; there's no characteristic attempt to spread to other computers. From the computer's standpoint, the malware program is indistinguishable from a normal web format viewer or some other utility that talks to the internet. Modern browsers DO warn when add-ons are installed outside browsing sessions, but those prompts can be overridden and anyway most malware doesn't take the form of browser add-ons in the first place.
In short, I don't know what you're expecting Antimalware to do other than block or scan and remove.

 

[Mercutio]

Back to mubs's link: I have no idea how to prove or disprove the functionality of the product. Exploits are by their nature generally not well known or documented outside the communities for which they are a primary concern. If I install an anti-exploit package and I continue to not be impacted by exploits, does that really mean that the program is doing its job, or have I just done a good job at picking and maintaining the software on the systems I manage?
Hopefully there can be some independent testing of the product near future.

 

[mubs]

It's never white or black, just shades of gray. Wasn't heuristics a big deal a few years back? Doesn't all malware have some common characteristics?

I've had it running for a couple of days, and there is no noticeable system slowdown, so I'll just leave it running for now. Perhaps, just perhaps, it might be of some benefit.

 

[P5-133XL]

I don't know that all malware has common characteristics. Malware us just an application that is doing something unwanted by the customer and that makes it subjective and difficult to quantify. I've actually known people that sought out and deliberately installed, what I would have considered Malware, on their machines because of some benefit it did like a search engine or a useful tool bar. Is it malware for those people, I would argue no, but for me the spyware portion or the advertising pop-ups made it a definite yes.

 

[Chewy509]

Avast to purchase AVG... https://blog.avast.com/avast-and-avg-a-future-together

Make of this as you will...

 

[Mercutio]

With any luck, this will mean that AVG will stop being a thing, because it is awful and needs to stop existing.

 

[blakerwry]

My biggest beef with AVG was the nagging that seeped into the free version. Avast got just as bad in later years. I guess I shouldn't complain when getting something for free.

 

[LunarMist]

I used Avast in Gamester mode to avoid the popups.