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Ask Slashdot: Actual Best-in-Show For Free Anti Virus?

Posted by samzenpus on from the good-and-cheap dept.

First time accepted submitter paperclipman writes "I'm on the college student budget and want to make sure that my recent investment in an Acer laptop will last me a good long while. I like to think of myself as a reasonably competent CPU user so I'm no adventurous link-clicker, but I do download some music as a recent SoundCloud devotee. My Kaspersky antivirus will be expiring shortly and I don't particularly care to renew with that steep of a fee — any advice from fellow thrifts?"

6 of 515 comments (clear)

  1. Re:You want ad-blocking, not AV by i+kan+reed · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Don't want a virus? Do the following:

    1. Remove all adobe products. Flash is ok with flashblock.
    2. Keep firefox or chrome up to date, don't use IE.
    3. Remove java plugin.
    4. Install adblock and noscript.
    5. Have a router, block everything inbound.

    The number of things that can infect you with that setup is about 0.

  2. Re:Simple by Erioll · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not the same thing IMO. A great amount of malware requires that the user does something. So "download our .exe and ignore the security prompts!" is still a very large section of things, and has nothing to do with a secure OS or not. Programs running as a user has as many rights as a user themselves. That's what most virus software is for: detecting that you're trying to run something that's "bad" but it's not exploiting security holes to do so. It's just running with "full trust" just like any other program on your machine, and behaving badly.

  3. Re:Simple by chmod+a+x+mojo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well then you obviously don't have any mid to large size archives on your disk. MSE chokes and uses tons of CPU ( a known issue, supposedly "has gotten better" , not that you would notice a whole lot... ) on rar / or zip files and sometimes cab files when it scans random files in the background and lands on the archive. I've had it choke off a dual core 3.2Ghz processor so bad I thought I was back on a 486DX again with the program load / wait times.

    That said it SEEMS to do a decent job, either that or I'm not going to the shady side of the 'net. Malwarebytes doesn't find much other than the occasional cookie it doesn't like the looks of on either of my machines that run Windows.

    I was using ClamAV for quite a while, and still would if it had a decent RT scanner.

    --
    To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
  4. College student? Check your benefits by PPalmgren · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Granted it was ten years ago, but when I went to UNCC, there was a small selection of software provided by the school under a shared license for free to students. This included, in my case, norton corporate, which was not intrusive and did an admirable job. Might wanna check around and see if you have similar options available. While the best free AV might be MSE for Windows, you might be able to get a paid AV for free.

  5. Re:Simple by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    MSE is good IF, and its a BIG IF, you are not going anywhere risky, as it doesn't seem to do as well on drive bys as the others. This isn't really surprising as it started out as Giant AntiSpy before being bought by MSFT, but if he is going anywhere other than school sites I'd be leery if he isn't tech savvy.

    A better choice IMHO and one I've been giving to my customers for a couple of years now is Comodo Antivirus as its butt simple, pretty much install and forget, is free, and is VERY good at stopping malware cold. If you want extra protection it asks on install if you wish to use their secure DNS which blacklists malware sites, but its strictly optional. its light on resources, doesn't pop up 40 ads a week trying to sell you crap like Avast has been doing lately, and has a really nice sandboxing feature that is enabled by default but which you can set to be as granular as you like, anything from off to whitelistsing to blacklisting, really nice.

    All in all out of the free AVs I'd rate it "best of show" because not only does it have sane defaults and great sandboxing, but its as simple or as fine grained as you want it to be. With MSE there really isn't any way to change...well anything, with Comodo if you desire you can tweak pretty much everything if you choose, from the behavior of the scanning engine, to the levels of paranoia on the sandboxing (which MSE doesn't do) to who what and when it scans and where it will scan.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  6. Re:You want ad-blocking, not AV by ozgood · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You don't even need to run an .exe. The RSA hack a while ago was social engineered with an excel exploit. http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002226.html