Do you all have anti virus software?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Anti-virus software? Terrible stuff. Slows down everything, always making the wrong decisions and annoying the hell out of me. Never touch it.

Spyware checkers? Sure. Free and easy.

Upgrades? Absolutely never. For every upgrade you download to plug a hole, another one is opened. This becomes a perpetual cycle. Not many viruses are written these days to attack 10-year old software, so I’m not worried, and besides, I have most of the dangerous features of programs turned off.

I’m on the Internet 8 hours a day and have yet to become infected. Sure, I get 50 viruses emailed to me daily. They’re fun to watch, I recognize most of them, I even collect them. I just don’t execute them.

Of course there’s always the first time…

I spend much of my time cleaning viruses off of other people’s computers. The ones that have Norton or MacAfee installed, that is. The virus slips by the defenses, disables Norton, starts eating away at the innards, and they call me. It’s job security.

42

In that case, watch out for ZIP file attachments. We’re in the thick of a new outbreak of a mydoom variant right now. Symantec’s calling it mydoom.ax and McAfee’s calling it mydom.bb - whichever name you like, it’s definitely active tonight and considered highly active.

43

Og like downloads. Og use AVG antivirus.

44

Ohh, 'e’s a sneaky one, that new worm!

Just got a “we cleaned this” message in my email - the virus was trying to sneak in dressed as a URL in an email. Something along the lines of “hopefullyenticingwebsite.com” where .com is an executable file type, rather than well, dot com.

BTW - Symantec users can thank one of my co-workers. He leaned on Symantec and essentially said “You’re not waiting until tomorrow to release the signatures and you’re going to have a cleanup tool in my hands by tomorrow morning, right? Thank you!”

Been an interesting 24 hours - all this phoning and black-berrying about mydoom took place during dinner tonight and just yesterday, I had dinner with the guy who discovered and figured out a virus called “moonlit”

45

Bullshit. I’ve seen mydoom come and go. ZIP files are no more dangerous than any other kind. Absolutely harmless unless you unZIP and execute something.

Personally, I like to unZIP and torture them. Like tearing the wings off flies. :smiley:

46

Oh, is that what’s dumping all that spam in my emailbox tonight? Not that I’m worried, but the extra time lost retrieving my mail is annoying…

47

Well, given that nobody’s bothered to port any viruses to Linux*, I don’t feel the need to run any antivirus software on either of my Linux boxes.

Given that Linux is over a decade old now, I doubt I ever will.

*(The best-known worms won’t even run on Wine, which is obviously a serious failing of the emulation layer. I wonder if Linux will be ready for the desktop when people can reliably lose files and experience massive slowdown after opening a few email attachments. ;))

48

Between Wan blocking, a firewall, and Firefox, I have no need for AV protection., it just wastes clock cycles.

49

Knock it off.

50

Is there some technical reason that OSX hasn’t has any virii reported for it other than low-market-share?

51

Ditto. I’m running Windows XP and it checks for updates on its own and I install those as they occur.

Additionally, I use AVG, Spyboy, the paid version of AdAware, and SpywareBlaster.

You’d be surprised how much stuff can get on your computer just through security holes in IE or through emails and never even know about it. I use Mozilla 99% of the time and I have no idea how it gets on there, but periodically those programs all find stuff. Most of them are on auto-update, too.

52

Err…Spybot. And I’ve heard very good things about ZoneAlarm, but since I sometimes have a second computer hooked up to the 'net I actually have a hardware firewall… if you have a 'net connection that’s constantly on or have a fixed IP you should definitely be using some kind of firewall.

53

<Han Solo>

“Breaking into UNIX ain’t like dusting crops, farm boy.”

</Han Solo>

There’s a reason UNIX is still the preferred choice for researchers and academics after 25-plus-years of computer development.

54

No antivirus on any of my windows machines, except for my wife’s.

I do run antivirus on my linux server but all it does is filter windows viruses from my emails before I download them to my laptop. (ClamAV is free and updates nightly)

All my machines are behind a hardware router/firewall, so all ports are closed unless I specifically open them, which protects against windows holes to the outside world.

I don’t use MSIE unless Firefox craps out which is almost never.

I can manually scan anything suspicous that I’ve downloaded… but I’ve never found anything this way.

I do, however, swear by Tiny Firewall. If anything malicious gets onto any of my machines, Tiny Firewall will detect it before it can either change any settings or phone home. And it’s tiny, consuming almost nil resources. I think most viruses these days are more concerned with getting back out onto the internet in one way or another, to steal data or hijack resources, than to destroy data. A good software firewall can catch most malicious software with much less strain on system resources.
As I said, though, my wife’s machine still has Norton on it, and I’d probably recommend some type of AV for probably 90% of internet users.
For the record, I’ve been on the internet since '96, and I’ve had only one virus, in 2001. (for 20 seconds)

55

After all those horrible tales, Courgette, is you computer still unprotected ?

56

Count me as another AV convert.

I’ve always had Spybot, Adaware, and spywareblaster, and had the XP firewall turned on, and we switched to Firefox last month, and overall felt pretty safe–then we picked up a virus last week that, annoyingly, disabled Task Manager, the Device Manager, and msconfig. Apparently it got in on Outlook Express which was the default e-mail, and which opens automatically whenever you click on “Contact Us”. Which we do, occasionally, by mistake, when surfing.

So I rushed down to Office Max, bought McAfee which my brother the computer Geek recommended.

So McAfee couldn’t get it off.

So I ended up having to download all the Windows security updates, including SP2, which fixed it.

Then a few days later we picked up a keystroke logger/password stealer virus/worm from IRC somewhere (who knows what the teens get up to when Mommy and Daddy are in bed). So McAfee caught it, AND it caught it in the System Restore backup file, too.

AND since then it has caught one more, incoming, in progress, while I was sitting here doing my own message boards, and snuffed it.

So I’m a convert. I’ve got it set to run every morning at 6 a.m.

And I removed all icons for IE from the desktop, the Start list, etc. If folks wanna run IE, they have to go into Programs and find it. My spyware “hits” from Spybot and Adaware and the annoying fastclickmedia ads that Google’s popup blocker won’t block have dropped way, way off since we switched to Firefox.

And I removed Outlook Express from the Default e-mail list.

And I turned Windows Update back on, although I told it to consult me before installing any.

Moral of story: No one is safe any more. Refusing to open attachments isn’t enough to protect you anymore.

57

:eek: Well, yes. I might have another look at AVG or something, however. I have a newer and faster machine than the last one I ran AV software on. Maybe the performance hit will be less noticable now.

58

I definitely like AVG. Been through Nortons, a side-trip to TrendMicro’s PC-cillin, but AVG so far is the smoothest to use, and does the job.

Mind, Housecall from TrendMicro is good when something newer than AVG has kept up with comes on the scene.

59

InvidiousCourgette, I had all kinds of problems (memory, other software compatibility) with both Norton and McAfee and switched to AVG a few months ago. I haven’t had any problems. It’s scanning for viruses as I type this (it sets itself up to scan daily) and there’s no disruption at all.

GT

60

Just a side note. I was a fan of Housecall/Trend Micro’s scanner, too. But, after a long, exhaustive search trying to track down the reason my computer insisted on accessing my floppy drive every time I looked at a directory on ANY OTHER drive, I found Housecall was the culprit. If this ever happens to you, the only thing I can suggest from memory is there were a bunch of files starting with AU that Housecall installed without warning. Uninstalling Housecall did nothing, but deleting them fixed the problem.

I haven’t wanted to tangle with Housecall again since.

And if you don’t use Outlook, you have removed one of the main entry points to badware.