Need new Antivirus

Yeah, I'd rather put a fucking drill to the side of my head than deploy SEP on my network. McAfee's offering is even worse. To be honest with you pretty much every AV I've tried on my network has been shit at catching malware, and I've tried Symantec, Mcafee, Trend, and Kaspersky. Finally settled for System Center Endpoint protection (basically corp version of MS security essentials) along with Malwarebytes Business edition. That's pretty much the most effective setup we've tested/implemented to date. I'm aware that the MS AV product is supposedly shit, but in testing it wasn't any better/worse than the other vendors I mentioned. If we get a virus, malwarebytes does most of the heavy lifting anyways.

My suggestion is just to use any free AV along with Malwarebytes Pro.

Alkorin_sl said:

Oh god. SEP 11 is complete garbage. SEP 12 is worse.

eset NOD32 works well for me, has for years, and it doesn't bog down my boxes.

Click to expand...

we use eset...its good. We have a hell of a time doing push installations.

Bitdefender.

Nod32, there isn't anything better, imho.

I'm using Webroot SecureAnywhere. They try to upsell different versions, but you don't really need anything other than the basic Antivirus. Also note that old codes from ebay for the 2011 edition or whatnot are honored with the newest edition. So it can be had for ten bucks a year or so.

Minimum overhead on my machine. Relatively noninvasive--it politely asks before it goes postal on a file I've downloaded. I've used it for years.

i have a bunch on various pcs at home

avira - on my PC supposed to be the best at finding malware (highest detection rates in a few independent tests), but free version has annoying popup every day. a program BGPKiller someone wrote blocks the popup

Avast free - on wifes laptop, seems to work fine just needs to re-register the free license key once a year. makes a super loud annoying sound whenever it updates which scares the hell out of my wife and makes me laugh like crazy. probably a way to disable it, but don't tell her

BitDefender free - on kids PC, probably the most minimal with very little UI and intrusion.

I paid for 2 copies of MalwareBytes Pro (6 licenses) and have it also installed on every single PC, honestly I don't know the diff between MBP and the other ones but I always feel better with it and another free virus program installed

i'd also recommend installing CCLeaner to remove junk files and clean up registry

You seriously don't need AV software. Uninstall java, run adblock/noscript when browsing and create standard user accounts for any kids/technophobes that use the machine and you're far safer than any AV software will make you.

If you absolutely HAVE to have something ESET is the least offensive AV software I've ever seen.

Vvoid_sl said:

I see this all the time, so I feel compelled to ask, what do you do if you want java? Or you're installing it for someone that has no idea what noscript does and they get frustrated when not a goddamn thing shows up on most websites because of it? I realize that if you want to be safe yada yada, but no java and noscript is not really feasible for the vast majority of people, even people that have some technical knowledge. It is sort of like deciding since you are allergic to tomatoes, let's just not eat anything but bread and water to be safe. You're missing out on a ton of shit for the sake of being over protective.

To follow up on that, since you did say if you must have one use ESET, I haven't used it in the past decade so I'm assuming it has gotten a lot better, but is it really less obtrusive than MSE? Ignoring the fact that MSE is free.

Click to expand...

I feel people have the capability to learn things. Having someone hit the S in noscript and "allow" certain plugins shouldnt be outside of a human beings potential for growth. People need to have some basic want/need to learn a program if they want to use a PC. The others I have no time for.


The corporate ESET we use is really lightweight and catches quite a few things. We do not have a ton of issues with rouge browsing in our environment. The Palo Alto takes care of most of that.

Vvoid_sl said:

I don't disagree with that sentiment, but if you're doing it for a friend or relative (which is the more likely scenario, as corporate is a whole different ballgame), do you really want to be doing tech support for the next weeks/months/years on noscript, or maybe just once every couple years when they get a virus? A virus is one thing that they can feel responsible for causing, but if you make it so they can't view most of the internet easily, that's your fault in their eyes and sure as shit you're going to get that call. Or you're going to make them all pissy when you tell them that since they can't learn it, you have no time for them.

If you're paid tech support somewhere in a corporate setting, maybe you don't care, but if it were big enough it would still be vastly easier to just reimage the drive than deal with everyone in the company not knowing why they can't view the page they want to view.

And that still didn't answer my question about not installing java, which guarantees even more hassle for you (even if we all agree it is a pain in the ass).

Click to expand...

The only thing worse than installing java is being forced to have java 6 on every pc...like I have to.

radditsu_sl said:

The only thing worse than installing java is being forced to have java 6 on every pc...like I have to.

Click to expand...

You should be thankful, because Java 8 is even worse since it only has "high" and "very high" security settings and pretty much requires that any site you want to access has to be manually added to the "exception site" list in the Java control panel. Then, if you want to specify these sites network wide you can't use GPO's, but instead some sort of file copy mechanism to copy a signed config file to each machine.

We currently have a case open with Oracle because we want to have our Oracle EBS server upgraded to support Java 8, which they've already done in a test instance, but the accounting folk can't test because installing Java 8 on their machine breaks their access to production which only supports Java 6. Even worse, uninstalling Java 8 and reinstalling java 6 breaks access to both systems. Oracle support told us to use "system restore" to get Java 6 working again lol.. I told them to go fuck themselves and that I shouldn't have to use system restore to overcome their shitty, bug ridden POS Java client and I wanted either a way that they could access both environments using the same computer, or a procedure for uninstalling Java 8 that doesn't break everything.

Both Java/Oracle and Adobe can go both fuck each other. Such shit software.