yeah, and it’s not the threat of viruses. it’s because most people are idiots.
I ran AVG on my systems for three or four years. after seeing no alerts and no benefit I just stopped installing it after a reformat which cut windows loading time by about 40 seconds.
I run four systems in my house, one of which is a web / mail server. my personal system is in a dmz. the worst trouble i’ve had is someone spamming through my smtp server because I hadn’t locked it down.
the threat is exaggerated. anti-virus companies want to sell their products. of course they’re exaggerating. ignorance is the real threat.
side note: i’m no typhoid mary. I do use “housecall” to check my systems if they get twitchy and the worst we find is some dodgy cookies.
Anti-virus software is a total scam. For me, since I can smell one a mile away.
Anti-virus software is a godsend. For others who wouldn’t know a virus if it hit them on the head (which they often do).
I’ll echo the reccomendation for AVG, if you must use something. But most anti-virus software not only treats every action as suspicious, which is uber-annoying, but it also slows down every action in the computer to a crawl. Since it hooks into so many places, it seriously degrades general thruput. I can’t stand it; the cure is worse than the disease.
And yes, I have seen computers completely hosed by viruses. Not mine.
A word to the wise. Housecall, while a good scanner, leaves nasty pieces of itself behind even if uninstalled. In the version I tried, it inserted a call to access ALL drives on my system, even floppies, whenever ANY program made a single directory request, and it was difficult to remove. So beware.
I just want to check something:
-Is it the contention of those here who say that the threat is illusory or exaggerated, that malicious programs such as viruses, worms, trojans etc can be seen coming, and avoided?
My understanding is that this simply isn’t the case - that there are ways in which these programs can get on an unprotected, regardless how carefully you tread.
It depends on the PC. If it’s a few years old, you are going to spend more than 2 hours just applying the zillion Windows updates that have happened since the original install. And Microsoft seems to make no effort to make that a smooth process. You have to do multiple re-boots and answer stupid ‘do you agree’ popups during the process so you can’t just walk away and let it do its thing.
Then, you get to re-install all the other software. Some of which will require an unlock key that the user can’t find. (Bonus points if they also can’t find the original driver disks that came with the machine, good luck hunting down the right drivers)
It’s a time-consuming process and most people are loath to do it.
The chances of getting a crippling virus are somewhat significantly lower than the chances of getting a quiet, sneaky trojan that sits there and steals your sensitive information.
I mean, c’mon people! This thread is the one in which Lobsang says antivirus programs are crap and he knows he was right never to have bothered with them; and in last week’s pit, he was whimpering about how someone had hacked his eBay and Paypal accounts, and cancelled his credit card and spend five hundred quid of his money.
I’ll concede the point that most users could use some protection. God knows I’ve seen my fair share of post-porn-surfing teenage-owned laptops (shhh, don’t tell his mother :)). This thing was a disaster. I ran Spybot on it and it found over 4000 problems. Ad-aware foundan additional 1500. About 30 of the gems he got would NOT allow themselves to be removed. And while I could have sat there for 6 hours getting rid of all the nasty .exe’s while constantly rebooting into safe-mode, I gave him a XP CD and told him to follow the directions when he re-installs Windows.
But that’s spyware. Like another poster said, this is much more detrimental to you and your computers than viruses. Viruses are usually aimed at crippling/disabling your PCs, not stealing your information. I think the terminology here is confused.
Personally, I find the need for antivirus software overblown on my own computers because I have an extremely good understanding of how the system works and what can happen when I click on something. If my machine and browser are fully patched, I’ll feel pretty safe visiting any URL you throw at me, because I know the difference between javascript and activex and I know what each one can do (for the most part, I do not worry about javascript doing anything but annoying me, and I treat activex like a box of death). I know what a .scr is and why you can’t open one. I know that codecs are code and don’t trust them. I know that any file I download should be treated with suspicion to determine whether it really is what it says it is, and even when that’s proven, sometimes it’s still not a good idea to open it. I actually read the security patch descriptions so I know which components contain the vulnerabilities, and I think about whether those vulnerabilities can be exposed through various actions of mine. Sure, I’m not perfect and I occasionally do something that could cause me to be infected. In fact, occasionally I’ll do it knowing full well that I’m doing something a little risky. I’ll decide I’m pretty sure I’m about to install a trustworthy program, but not 100%, so I’ll just do it anyway and log what it does, or run it in a sandbox or whatever (virtual PCs that never save their disk state are very useful for trying out the “LOOK AT THE BOWLING ELVES ANIMATION!!!1” crap your aunt sends you).
And my machines are clean. I keep them fully patched, and occasionally, I install the AV software that my employer recommends just to double check. I usually end up uninstalling it because my machine slows down and when I do some filesystem monitoring, I determine that the realtime scanning is costing me a metric fuckton in terms of IO performance.
My family, on the other hand, cannot be trusted. The virus threat to people who do not know what they are doing is enormous. My wife cannot tell the difference between a prompt that says, “security alert: some of the items on this page are insecure. display anyway?” and one that says “security alert: this page would like to run Systim.Updaterzzzz.ocx from Micrsoft Corporation. Would you like to allow it?” Which is why she’s not an admin on her own machine, and why I still check it regularly anyway.
BTW, I don’t use the Windows Firewall, because I have an actual hardware firewall, but I hear a lot of disparaging remarks about it being a pile of crap and/or totally hackable. Is this true? Is there actual evidence that Windows Firewall doesn’t do a good job? Are there security vulnerabilities in it?
Viruses, in my book, are simply any self replicating program that can infect other machines. What they do can varies widely. Annoyance and destruction was popular but now you see more things that have a monetary upside. Notably zombies, botnets and holding peoples files to ransom.
But yeah, if you’re careful then you probably don’t need a virus scanner, and I’d certainly never pay for one (and some of the pay one are bloatware from hell). Personally I’d rather have a scanner and not have to bother, then I can be pretty safe whilst not having to worry overly about what I do or wether the file (that I’m expecting) from Joe Bloggs might be infected. Sometimes I have to open the attachment, just because it’s worked related doesn’t mean they’re not infected.
The thing is if you’re getting spyware then you can get viruses, viruses are just spyware that can infect something else from your machine. Basically once something is running on your computer without your permission (or knowledge) you’re potentially hosed.
For what it’s worth I think that the big security companies do overplay the threat of viruses, particularly to home users. On the other hand there is a threat, it’s very real and not as vanishingly small as some of you seem to think it is.
Popping in to say that I was hit with about 15 trojans today from two blogspot/blogger pages. Their help section is full of people reporting that their blogs seem to be attempting to download trojans, and, as I read it, Blogger replying that that’s a problem for the user end.
In grad school, my computer’s AV software intercepted a virus from software that I had to purchase for a class. Turns out a computer at the software maker had been infected. These days, I use AVG plus Spybot/AdAware/SpywareBlaster.
Reinstalling the whole system in 2 hours, if you don’t have a recent disk image based backup of the whole hard drive (which most people don’t) just isn’t realistic, unless maybe you don’t use the computer for anything and never bothered to install any software on it.
OS install - up to 2 hours (assuming Windows here, or we wouldn’t be talking about viruses anyway)
Patches, service packs and updates - I dunno - four hours maybe? (including all the restarts)
Reinstallation of applications (and their updates, and tweaking their settings) - another 4 hours at least - a lot more if you have a large collection of applications you like to use.
