Antivirus Protection? For Your Best Protection, Buy a Little Known Product
ZDNet Au has an interesting article called "Why popular antivirus apps 'do not work'". The article posits that apps like Symantec, McAfee, TrendMicro ... the big 3 ... do the worst job of protecting you because virus writers, knowing they are the big sellers, target their malware to bypass these AV products.
"The most popular brands of antivirus on the market… have an 80 percent miss rate… So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in," said (Graham) Ingram (the general manager of Australia's Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT)).
I'm not sure about that 80% miss rate. I usually watch sites like AV-comparatives.org or Virus Bulletin to check on results of comparisons between products. Nowhere do I see that level of miss rate.
I will admit I have changed from Symantec to McAfee (once Symantec started their activation program, as I won't buy activated software ... except Windows) to NOD32 (when I decided that I didn't like the ActiveX part of McAfee ... plus both Symantec and McAfee are bloated and slow down PCs a lot. As a gamer I want the best performance I can get. NOD32 has a small market share, but it has a very good reputation among its users, almost a cult following. It has a small footprint, very good heuristics and very good scanning speed.
Also, I run BOClean, an anti-Trojan scanner; once again by another small company. Both BOClean and NOD32 have caught malware before it reached my system.
This is the setup I would recommend. A virus scanner, whether a small company or big company ... at least get something. And an anti-Trojan scanner (besides BOClean there is a-squared and TrojanHunter, among others). You can't be too careful.Tags: BOClean, NOD32, Symantec, McAfee, Antivirus
Posts
2 comments:
Many programms include spyware modules. Use anti-spyware for protect your privacy.
As for me, I like professional anti-spy software like PrivacyKeyboard by Raytown Corporation LLC.
You can download it here: http://download.softsecurity.com/1/14/prvkbd.zip (~4MB)
Anti-Spyware: Efficiency of the Means of Defense
the 80% miss rate comes from new/unknown malware...
they're specifically talking about new/unknown malware when they're talking about the 80% miss rate and they're completely ignoring the fact that unknown malware doesn't stay unknown for long... they also gloss over the fact that you really can't expect known malware scanners to be all that good at detecting unknown malware (that's why there are generic techniques and why those techniques should be used to complement known malware scanning)...
it's just a little scare-mongering to make for an interesting soundbite...
Post a Comment