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It's their product, they should be able to develop it however they want to. I don't see McAfee or Symantec writing any of the code that makes Windows run (or crash). How would you feel if you're being told you have to develop something one way because a company wants to make money off of you but can't anymore because you've improved your product?

It's totally and completely ridiculous what these anti-virus companies are coming up with. When you develop a program to help make another program more secure you have to understand that somewhere along the way those problems will be fixed. When those problems are fixed you will have to come out with a new product (do new products exist anymore?).

It's not like these anti-virus companies have good products anyways, NOD32 is so much better.

There are other, lighter anti-virus packages, such as NOD32. Don't even notice it running, yet it detects things fine (it noticed an exploit on a website just now). Very small updates. Only downside is the user interface is a little bit technical, but it's not that hard.

To be honest, I can't see how MS could do a WORSE job. Imagine if Symantec made a whole operating system? Shudder.

Now, if ESet was complaining, then perhaps I'd be thinking something different.

Interesting reading, you may want to read this article before drawing conclusions about Vista, MacOSx or *nix virus vulnerabilities. http://www.eset.com/download/whitepapers/Eset_ALee VBJul06.pdf I found the section on "Social Engineering" especially interesting. With the establishment of the first two MacOSX viruses, (yeah yeah, don't give me the it's a trojan, not a virus arguement that apple uses, it still gets in, exploits your system and messes it up... ) and a whole stream of new Win32 viruses, I found the final statements in theis article particulary important. Virus' don't get into your system by accident, they exploit something about the "system" to get in. The easiest exploit, the user. (Wonder when they are going to make a security vulnerability patch for us?) There will always be code vulnerabilites in all programs that can be exploited (yes that means you Mac people too!) and there will always be people who want to exploit that flaw for personal gain...or financial gain... or just to get attention. Reducing access to Kernal level operations will go a long way to killing off older virus strains, but it won't eleminate them. As for Symantec and Mcafee's arguements about MS.. well... I can tell you from being in the IT industry for 17 years... not having access to the kernal is the best thing they can do to these two. They missed viruses on a regular basis under 98, 2000, Me, XP and 2003 that often required full repair installs, or full reinstalls to fix. Keeping them out of the kernal may at least stop them from killing your computer's performance while they fail to protect you.

NOD32 has awesome corporate anti-virus software. Very lean on memory/cpu resources and the remote admin features are very powerful. I tend to remove Symantec products from pcs where possible, because they are so bloated and resource hungry that they slow the pcs down to a crawl.

http://www.eset.com/

I recommend these programs to all my co-workers, friends and family.
BlueFrog - Fight spam with the Blue Community
DefilerPak - Video/Audio Codec Pak
FireFox - IE replacement
Foobar2000 - Audio Player
MyUninstaller - ADD/Remove Programs alternative
Nero - CD/DVD burning software
NOD32 - Very fast and accurate Virus Scanner
Thunderbird - Outlook Express Replacement
Treewalk DNS - Local caching DNS
Trillian - Many IM Clients in One
UltraEdit32 - Best Windows Text Editor (check out column mode)
UltraMon - If you multiple monitors this program is great
Zoomplayer - DVD/Media player

Hello,

A bit of searching came up with the following free or trial versions of anti-virus programs which are capable of detecting and removing Win32/MyWife (née CME-24):

Alwil - Avast! 4 Home Edition (free for personal non-commercial use)
ESET - NOD32 trial version (30-day evaluation)
Grisoft - AVG Free Edition (free for personal non-commercial use)
Kaspersky Lab - Anti-Virus Personal 5.0 (30-day evaluation)
McAfee - VirusScan (30-day evaluation)
Microsoft - Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (KB890830) (free)
Panda - Titanium Antivirus 2006 (30-day evaluation)
Sophos - Anti-Virus (30-day evaluation)
Symantec - W32.Blackmal@mm Removal Tool (free)
Trend Micro - PC-cillin Trial Version (30-day evaluation)

I'm certain other readers will look up and post links to additional vendors, too. Ob-disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies listed above, so there.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Hello,

A bit of searching came up with the following free or trial versions of anti-virus programs which are capable of detecting and removing Win32/MyWife (née CME-24):

Alwil - Avast! 4 Home Edition (free for personal non-commercial use)
ESET - NOD32 trial version (30-day evaluation)
Grisoft - AVG Free Edition (free for personal non-commercial use)
Kaspersky Lab - Anti-Virus Personal 5.0 (30-day evaluation)
McAfee - VirusScan (30-day evaluation)
Microsoft - Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (KB890830) (free)
Panda - Titanium Antivirus 2006 (30-day evaluation)
Sophos - Anti-Virus (30-day evaluation)
Symantec - W32.Blackmal@mm Removal Tool (free)
Trend Micro - PC-cillin Trial Version (30-day evaluation)

I'm certain other readers will look up and post links to additional vendors, too. Ob-disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies listed above, so there.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

I do computer repairs in a retail store. Even though we don't sell it I end up suggesting NOD32 from http://www.eset.com/ to 95% of my virus and spyware removal customers. Its very lite at under 10MB for the program installer and uses less memory that most scanners. On a computer i worked on last week I ran a scan with their copy of Norton 2005 and found 158 infections... It was able to remove 27. I ran a scan with NOD32 and it found an additional 174 infections and removed them all.

I also like to run additional scans with MS Antispyware, Webroot Spysweeper (best non-free program I've found) and Lavasoft Ad-aware.

For customer's who don't want to spend money on NOD32 andy Spysweeper I usually direct them to download Avast and MS Antispyware to prevent future infections.

Also, last but not least I like to install Firefox and set it as the default browser.