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Avast is Czech, as is its subsidiary AVG, Avira is German, BitDefender is Romanian, ESET is Slovak, F-Secure is Finnish and Panda Security is Spanish. Sophos is British, so it is probably more likely to be tampered with.

OK, they're ALL out to get you. If you didn't pay for it, you're the product. I fear my local government more than a far-away one. I'm a minnow, no some plankton living in the social/financial sea. It's only metadata. If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. Ever uploaded something to VirusTotal/Google/MS/Amazon? If it's unencrypted in the cloud, it's probably now on someone's ELSE's cloud too. If encrypted, it's still fair game. KAV have good reviews. So I'll just leave this here and get my coat,

OVERVIEW
https://www.pcworld.com/articl...
https://www.av-test.org/en/ant...
http://chart.av-comparatives.o...

Free
https://usa.kaspersky.com/free...
https://www.bitdefender.com/su...
https://www.malwarebytes.com/m...
https://www.avira.com/en/free-...
https://home.sophos.com/
https://www.pandasecurity.com/...

Just PICK one just as long as it's not the default MS Defender. They couldn't stop it from getting in to start with, what makes you think their AV is going to do better?

Just download a free antivirus livecd and scan your system with that.

Options include but are not limited to:

AVG:
https://www.avg.com/en-us/resc...
https://www.avg.com/en-us/down...

Avira:
https://www.avira.com/en/downl...

Bitdefender:
http://download.bitdefender.co...

Comodo:
https://www.comodo.com/busines...

Dr. Web:
https://free.drweb.com/aid_adm...

F-Secure:
ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-vi...
https://www.f-secure.com/en/we...

Kaspersky:
http://support.kaspersky.com/v...
http://rescuedisk.kaspersky-la...

Thank you.

Are you a Linux user by chance?

I found this:

http://www.bitdefender.com/bus...

And it appears to be 100% free with a free license.

I know - people say *nix doesn't need antivirus program(s)...but clamav isn't enough to satisfy my needs.

###

Avira continues with popups? What a shame. One would think popups to be a form of adware. I enjoyed the configuration options which Avast didn't provide [several years ago].

MSE makes me wonder if I have any protection at all.

Avast may be the winner here [for free options] if you turn off most of the non-virus related scanning modules.

I like Clamwin for a backup manual scanner, it's caught some trojans MSE couldn't find. I hear detection rate is poor and false positives are common but it's one more tool in my chest.

Here are some free antivirus LiveCDs:

+ AVG:
http://www.avg.com/us-en/avg-r...

+ AVG ARL: The latest release version of the AVG Rescue CD GNU/Linux (ARL) with daily updated virus database,
latest alpha or beta version of the ARL and all the resources needed to build the ARL from scratch. Releases are signed!
https://share.avg.com/arl

+ Avira:
https://www.avira.com/en/downl...

+ BitDefender:
http://download.bitdefender.co...

+ Comodo Rescue Disk (CRD):
https://www.comodo.com/busines...

+ Dr.Web LiveCD:
http://www.freedrweb.com/lived...

+ F-Secure:
https://www.f-secure.com/en/we...
https://www.f-secure.com/en/we...

+ Kaspersky:
http://support.kaspersky.com/f...
http://support.kaspersky.com/v...
http://forum.kaspersky.com/ind...

As with all antivirus products, please read the greedy EULAs before proceeding.

Avira has been one of the highest rated hueristic scanners, detecting virii by behavior as opposed to a check sum of a know virus.

Free for personal use: https://www.avira.com/en/index

+ AVG:
http://www.avg.com/us-en/avg-r...

+ AVG ARL: The latest release version of the AVG Rescue CD GNU/Linux (ARL) with daily updated virus database,
latest alpha or beta version of the ARL and all the resources needed to build the ARL from scratch.
Releases are signed!
https://share.avg.com/arl

+ Avira:
https://www.avira.com/en/downl...

+ BitDefender:
http://download.bitdefender.co...

+ Comodo Rescue Disk (CRD):
https://www.comodo.com/busines...

+ Dr.Web LiveCD & LiveUSB:
http://www.freedrweb.com/livec...
http://www.freedrweb.com/liveu...

+ F-Secure:
https://www.f-secure.com/en/we...
https://www.f-secure.com/en/we...

+ Kaspersky:
http://support.kaspersky.com/f...
http://support.kaspersky.com/v...
http://forum.kaspersky.com/ind...

I've always found

AVG Free http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage
or
Avira Free http://www.avira.com/en/avira-free-antivirus

To be good free solutions.

" It [s]eems that [anti-virus vendor] Avira is having difficulty with an update of all their Premium customers' products. An update that has been downloaded over 70 million times is causing the 32-bit version of their AV software to block almost all critical Windows applications. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem . In most cases this causes Windows to not boot properly."

Just curious - wouldn't it read better like this:

"It seems that [anti-virus vendor] Avira is having difficulty with an update of all their Premium customers' products. The update, which has been downloaded over 70 million times, is causing the 32-bit version of their AV software to block almost all critical Windows applications. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem. In most cases the malfunctioning update causes Windows to not boot properly."

" It [s]eems that [anti-virus vendor] Avira is having difficulty with an update of all their Premium customers' products. An update that has been downloaded over 70 million times is causing the 32-bit version of their AV software to block almost all critical Windows applications. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem . In most cases this causes Windows to not boot properly."

Just curious - wouldn't it read better like this:

"It seems that [anti-virus vendor] Avira is having difficulty with an update of all their Premium customers' products. The update, which has been downloaded over 70 million times, is causing the 32-bit version of their AV software to block almost all critical Windows applications. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem. In most cases the malfunctioning update causes Windows to not boot properly."

You call them "Editors". Why? They don't edit anything. All they do is wade through the "Free p1llz 2 make sausage fatter!" "Designer shoes for the women of your website" and "I hate all $demographic" posts, modding them down, and picking through the rest to get something worth reading on the fron... Wait, what's that? That's what the Firehose is for?

Then just what the fuck do these people do? They're not paid, are they?!

This is an English language website. Please hire some editors who can correct the grammar of non-English speakers (as is most likely the case here) before posts are on the front page. Here, let me give you an example:

" It [s]eems that [anti-virus vendor] Avira is having difficulty with an update of all their Premium customers' products. An update that has been downloaded over 70 million times is causing the 32-bit version of their AV software to block almost all critical Windows applications. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem . In most cases this causes Windows to not boot properly."

I even added a link for you. I wasn't even paid to do this, and it took me 5 minutes.

I haven't figured out why people use these big, questionable hosting sites. Why not just go to the source?

http://www.avira.com/en/free-download-avira-antivir-personal

Which is why you don't run AV on a compromised machine. You boot from a rescue CD such as that provided by Avira or F-Secure.

Even that's not a perfect solution, of course, because it assumes your scanner can detect secondary vulnerabilities injected by the infection itself - or that no such vulnerability exists. Both of which seem rather optimistic assumptions. Ideally you'd have some sort of boot CD that can run checksums against every file on the system - but by the time you get to this point, it's probably several times quicker to rebuild the system.

This was a worldwide survey, so it's not surprising that not everybody is as brash and unselfcontrolled as the stereotypical American.

Also consider that the Avira's surveys use radio buttons, and that there were other "interesting" responses from which to choose, including various forms of physical violence.

And if your rather nervous about continuing to support the Microsoft Monopoly there's Avira, which I've been using for years for free.

'Surely the only way to really scan a computer is by booting into a guaranteed-clean OS?'

Yes, and there are a bunch of different, generally Linux-based, bootable CDs that do exactly this. Several of the major antivirus companies make these available, and I tried about half a dozen last year. Not all of them worked well (out of date, or ran slowly, or found too many false positives and deleted them without asking!), but I was happy with the Avira Rescue System:

http://www.free-av.com/en/tools/12/avira_antivir_rescue_system.html

One nice thing about this one is that they update the image 'several times a day' so you don't have to rely on the target system being networked to do an up to date scan (though a net update option is available if you can use it). Hardware support could be more complete (I had to revert to a VGA connection on one system) but otherwise no problems. I haven't tried running this from a flash drive, but there's a guide here:

http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=94935

Antivir has a command line scanner: http://www.avira.com/en/support/support_downloads.html

I have been using this for years -- free for home use:

antivir

because all antivirus software is made by people who are governed by the laws of the united states...

I regularly end up helping people who've bought a new PC which comes infested with the Norton malware. If you don't rip it out before the free trial ends it is virtually impossible to get rid of it. And, of course, if you wait until the trial expires, you've probably caught some nasty - their package is, to put it bluntly, a bloated and useless piece of shit.

I've had my issues with Symantec AV products totally borking the TCP/IP stack or just making the computer unbearably slow, but this is a little beyond anything I've ever heard. Regardless, you might put this in your digital toolbox. Norton Removal Tool

What really, really pissed me off was Vista. XP's security control centre quite happily recognised Avira, but Vista "conveniently" failed to recognise it. This means that unless you're reasonably technically savvy you will get constant nagging that you have no antivirus product. I wonder if that had anything to do with their plans to release this new product.

That's awfully paranoid. Maybe you should've tried installing the latest version.Old versions of Symantec Antivirus have had issues with Security Center as well and required patching. Software changes, life goes on.

Well you should try Avira Professional then. They've got a Linux version and the FIRST 30 days are FREE. With on-access virus scanning you should have the most secure Linux ever.

Don't forget to get LGA as well. It will give you all the benefits of WGA, on Linux - with the added bonus that it's FOSS!

Conficker racked up $9 billion in damages during its first quarter. That's far from the only worm out there. Old windows malware doesn't go away it's just added to the zoo.

Compare that to the estimated development costs for your average linux distro run about $1 billion.

So the savings of eradicating MSFT products for just three months would, using those numbers, give enough money to start linux from scratch 9 times over and still break out even. The more polished linux distros are now quite a few years ahead of Windows in most areas. In the areas they aren't $9 billion could buy a lot of improvement. Of that hypothetical $9 billion, it wouldn't cost but a fraction to make Filezilla as nice as Fugu or cyberduck.

Oh, but wait. There's the long tail of the worm. The windows worms run for years.

Microsoft products just aren't engineered for security. Xp, Vista and Vista 7 show us that nothing changes on that front. That's not a technical problem any more, that's an HR problem. Get rid of the MSFT boosters and you raise productivty.

I test security software for a national computer magazine in the UK. I've found that AVG detects most of the major threats; but if you know what you're doing Avira does a better job of alerting you to everything you might want to extirpate. The free version nags you every day, and you're not supposed to use it for commercial purposes; but if all you want is a one-time check I don't think there's anything stopping you installing the 30-day trial of the full package, running one full scan then removing it...

If people would stop downloading free_porn.jpg from 4chan, renaming it to free_porn.exe, and running it... we would not be having these problems.

If people would stop jumping to conclusions and assuming the answer is that simple, we would not be having these problems.

Who modded him insightful? This virus isn't spreading because of people doing something clearly shady, it's because Internet Explorer still has the JPG exploit unresolved. The user can simply view a webpage with a malicious image (which could just be a 1px whitespace) and it executes the malicious code. I've dealt with many computers in the past months since it surfaced.

Solutions? Don't use IE. Use SpyBot Search & Destroy to harden the systems, use Firefox with Adblock+ and NoScript. Use an antivirus program that actually has a webguard, such as Avira.

Back when I worked in a computer repair shop I used to run tests on heavily infected hard drives. I usually ran the test to show our new techs how good Antivir is and that their lovely AVG was not as good as they thought it was.
First I would create an image and scan the drive on our tech computer which was setup with Norton 2008, MacAfee v?, Antivir and AVG

The results where always the same,

Antivir http://www.avira.com/ found and removed the most infections and the computer would usually boot after the scan. It would still need a run of SpyBot and Windows Defender but would be fine. The really cool thing about Antivir is that it works and does not reduce your computer to a 486
I guess the reason why it is not widly known in the USA is because it is produced by a German company.

Norton AV/Isec and AVG are pretty much the same, worthless. They will find infections but will ignore/not clean the really tough infections. Most of the time the computer would no longer boot after a full scan, running Antivir on the drive would remove the remaining infections and the system would boot. As far as resource requirements, Norton is a total pig and they should be ashamed for releasing something as bad as Norton AV/Isec. Avg is not a hog but will not catch a lot of viruses.

McAfee is total garbage, light load on the system but will not find a lot. It also tends to get corrupted easily.

The above is from personal experience using AV products for many years fixing infected customer computers. I have not tried the 2009 editions of Norton, McAfee or AVG. I use Antivir myself on my Windows XP (gaming) computer.

Avira Antivir gets my vote. It works on XP and Vista, very small memory footprint, daily updates, consistent performance (check out http://www.av-comparatives.org/ and it's free. Available at http://www.avira.com/

Avira Antivir.

http://www.avira.com/en/pages/index.php

I was using nod32 as well. But the fact you can't renew your subscription with a web based email caused me to drop it.

Seriously, who these days is NOT using a web based email?

I now find Avira to be very good, but the nag screen a bit annoying. Also Avira found a few viruses that nod32 had missed to my surprise.

Well, yes but.. (you've seen the complaints).

Other decent free ones are:
Avast is popular.
AVira seems good, you get one popup ad per update.
Comodo permits business use.
BitDefender has a free version.
I'm not including ClamAV because it's just a scanner, no realtime protection.

Posting AC because I've moderated,
number11

I second your question. I used AVG Free for a long time and uninstalled it very quickly when I heard the news. But I'm having choosing a replacement cost-free anti-virus program for Windows. Here's are the factors I've been considering...

AVG Free Pro: seems pretty effective and runs inobtrusively (at least locally). Con: has DDoS'd websites in the past and perhaps still shouldn't be trusted.

Avira Pro: no track record of DDoS'ing websites. Con: obnoxious pop-ups "reminding" me about the premium version; apparently got some poor reviews for infection treatment.

Avast Pro: no track record of DDoS'ing websites. Con: requires manual re-registration.

I'm using Avira now but I'm considering switching again because of the pop-ups. Any advice? (And yes, I already run Linux but still need Windows for some things, and no, I'm not interested in paying for anti-virus software, since 99% of virus protection is common sense.)

http://www.avira.com/en/pages/index.php/

For a while I used BartPE with a copy of Avira anti-virus along with SpyBot Search and Destroy and Adaware. Haven't tried out the latest version of Adaware on Bart yet, been a while since I needed the disk.

BartPE - http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
Avira - http://www.avira.com/en/pages/index.php
SpyBot Search and Destroy - http://www.spybot.org/en/index.html
Adaware - http://www.lavasoft.com/

This is true, in fact after 60 days if you perform a scan even the clean result window will have a big red cross on it!

Uninstall and put Antivir (http://www.avira.com/en/pages/index.php) (you can change the update reminders in preferences) and Zonealarm (http://www.zonelabs.com/) on instead, for FREE!

You can also use AdAware (http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad-aware_se_pers onal.php) and Spybot Search and destroy (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index .html), to clean up spyware.

PS: DONT USE INTERNET EXPLORER (dont know about v7 though?) use firefox instead http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

http://www.avira.com/ is picking SPR/Hook.MadTool.B signature in C:\WINDOWS\system32\madCHook.dll file.

The source is MacRUMORS.

Hence, it's not confirmed....a RUMOR!

Switch to AVG or Avira.