Antivirus
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Hi, This year I did not renewed my antivirus subscription with a well known antivirus company, 2 month later l lost all my data due to virus activity, even having a new paid antivirus. Last year, the same I did not renewed my subscription and change to a free antivirus and also after 2 moth I lost my hard drive, also a well known antivirus company. Call my attention these cases so I would like to know if some of you has experienced same lost in similar situation? I suspect that if you do not renew your subscription some hacker will take care of you. Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know. The result in my case it is that I'm changing to mac due to pc is very affected by virus mafia, so I think Microsoft and other pc companies should take this situation seriously, because pc environment will be reduced and mac will grow also linux. thanks, Teo
Fully 99% of virus protection is refusing to open/download/visit every website/attachment/link that features omg, this is so cute you must see this! I actually changed my email address and only passed it out to people who didn't have a history of sending me attachments or links to every bit of garbage they find on the webnets. Nobody needs free e-cards or a link to musical farting bunny rabbits. If you spend your time with those things you will get a virus. Period.
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Hi, This year I did not renewed my antivirus subscription with a well known antivirus company, 2 month later l lost all my data due to virus activity, even having a new paid antivirus. Last year, the same I did not renewed my subscription and change to a free antivirus and also after 2 moth I lost my hard drive, also a well known antivirus company. Call my attention these cases so I would like to know if some of you has experienced same lost in similar situation? I suspect that if you do not renew your subscription some hacker will take care of you. Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know. The result in my case it is that I'm changing to mac due to pc is very affected by virus mafia, so I think Microsoft and other pc companies should take this situation seriously, because pc environment will be reduced and mac will grow also linux. thanks, Teo
browser security. Eliminating really bad insecure web technologies. Strengthening the "sandbox" model and ensuring browser activity remains contained within a well-defined sandbox that can be wiped clean when a browser is removed from the platform. More emphasis should be placed on user anonymity to ensure freedom of expression and eliminate all the "nosey" actors who want to know everything about you. I often wondered if anti-virus software was just another scam to steal all the data off of your platform.:suss:
David
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Umm, you know Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is free, right? EDIT: Oh, and the last virus that I've actually been hit by (As opposed to my AV snagging - I've been through Mcafee, Avast, Avira, Norton, and now MSE) was Monkey B... Now, the Monkey virus was a fun one... Back in the DOS days... It infected your boot sector, and basically set your computer up so any new drive it detected would become infected... And if that new drive was read-only, your computer wouldn't even be able to read it. The best part was, if you cleaned it with the wrong anti-virus software (such as Norton), it would wipe the boot sector and essentially brick your machine (Not entirely bricked, but really had to know your stuff to fix it)... Norton bricked the box, Mcafee went *poof* fixed. That was when I switched to Mcafee :)
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels)On the other hand, McAfee, while being good, is itself one of the worst culprits for interfering with system operation, sometimes so bad that the system might as well be bricked cause it is unusably slow. It's too bad that antivirus software is sometimes almost as bad as the software it is protecting you against. mvarey
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browser security. Eliminating really bad insecure web technologies. Strengthening the "sandbox" model and ensuring browser activity remains contained within a well-defined sandbox that can be wiped clean when a browser is removed from the platform. More emphasis should be placed on user anonymity to ensure freedom of expression and eliminate all the "nosey" actors who want to know everything about you. I often wondered if anti-virus software was just another scam to steal all the data off of your platform.:suss:
David
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Sandboxing downloads is a good idea. I have Sandboxie, which is free to use, but I'm wondering if there's a better (ideally free) solution for protection like this.
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Teo Gaona wrote:
Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know.
I have occasionally wondered if it wouldn't be in the interest of commercial outfits like Symantec to keep us all paranoid about viruses. Regardless, there are plenty of bad guys out there who genuinely want to take over computers to do their deeds. I haven't used a commercial AV program in years (I use the free version of Avast). I've been hit with one virus, ever. Back in 1999 I unthinkingly opened an email attachment from a friend in spite of it having no extension. McAfee allowed it to run, and it took 2 days to get my machine cleaned up. She had no clue her computer had just emailed a virus to everyone in her Outlook address book.
XAlan Burkhart
Here is a different take about the AV companies profiting from the virus scare (which I believe is real). Recently, a large, mainstream AV company started blocking our customers from downloading our product from our web site. They reported that they had detected a threat in it that they called WS.Reputation.1. But they more than just warned the user; they automatically quarantined the file and told the user that they had deleted it to protect the user's computer. It turns out, you can Google it, that WS.Reputation.1 is not a virus or malware of any kind! It is just this company's way of saying that so few of their customers have downloaded this file that they do not have enough data to know whether or not it has adversely affected those who have downloaded it. It took me over a week to get our installer added to their "white list" for the current version. Now, every time we release an updated version we have to go through the process again of getting it approved and added to their white list. I am wondering if it would be incorrectly marked as infected if I bought a digital signing certificate and signed the code. Oh yeah, guess who is one of the biggest sellers of digital certificates?
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Very true. The only viruses I've ever gotten were when I was young(er) and stupid(er?), and trusted executables from shady sources (a good learning experience though, it was part of what got me started down this path). I've never gotten one from simply browsing the internet or anything like that (people claim it's possible, but I'm skeptical).
I'm in the camp that believes its possible to get malware- it's the only explanation for how I and my family members got a virus. I'm really picky where I download from, and where on the interwebs I browse usually, but occassionally I've been to the shady sides of the net. I think a lot of it can be stopped by not logging in as admin as I stubbornly did for a long time. My daughter used to have a lower access account, within a few months of giving her admin access she got some sort of malware (I'm lumping them together). If you're not logged in as admin you may have benefited from this layer of protection.
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Hi, This year I did not renewed my antivirus subscription with a well known antivirus company, 2 month later l lost all my data due to virus activity, even having a new paid antivirus. Last year, the same I did not renewed my subscription and change to a free antivirus and also after 2 moth I lost my hard drive, also a well known antivirus company. Call my attention these cases so I would like to know if some of you has experienced same lost in similar situation? I suspect that if you do not renew your subscription some hacker will take care of you. Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know. The result in my case it is that I'm changing to mac due to pc is very affected by virus mafia, so I think Microsoft and other pc companies should take this situation seriously, because pc environment will be reduced and mac will grow also linux. thanks, Teo
Getting computer virus is like getting an STD... If you put your thingies anywhere and don't use protection, you're bound to get infected by a deadly virus. Even when you use protection, sometimes it fails, but if you don't usually have risky behavior, the likelihood to get infected is very slim, even when you're not 100% protected. You don't need to abstain :)
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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Hi, This year I did not renewed my antivirus subscription with a well known antivirus company, 2 month later l lost all my data due to virus activity, even having a new paid antivirus. Last year, the same I did not renewed my subscription and change to a free antivirus and also after 2 moth I lost my hard drive, also a well known antivirus company. Call my attention these cases so I would like to know if some of you has experienced same lost in similar situation? I suspect that if you do not renew your subscription some hacker will take care of you. Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know. The result in my case it is that I'm changing to mac due to pc is very affected by virus mafia, so I think Microsoft and other pc companies should take this situation seriously, because pc environment will be reduced and mac will grow also linux. thanks, Teo
I personally use NOD32, which seems to have the lowest performance impact and a high capture rating in testing. I also use a program (Host Manager) that blocks most ad and malicious sites through your hosts file. Apple has recently had to up it's anti virus game since it's market share is reaching the point that the bad guys are attacking iOS systems. So a switch to a Mac is only a delaying tactic not a solution. But as pointed out above - visits to questionable web sites and falling for the fake "You have a problem click here" is by far the main source of problems.
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Here is a different take about the AV companies profiting from the virus scare (which I believe is real). Recently, a large, mainstream AV company started blocking our customers from downloading our product from our web site. They reported that they had detected a threat in it that they called WS.Reputation.1. But they more than just warned the user; they automatically quarantined the file and told the user that they had deleted it to protect the user's computer. It turns out, you can Google it, that WS.Reputation.1 is not a virus or malware of any kind! It is just this company's way of saying that so few of their customers have downloaded this file that they do not have enough data to know whether or not it has adversely affected those who have downloaded it. It took me over a week to get our installer added to their "white list" for the current version. Now, every time we release an updated version we have to go through the process again of getting it approved and added to their white list. I am wondering if it would be incorrectly marked as infected if I bought a digital signing certificate and signed the code. Oh yeah, guess who is one of the biggest sellers of digital certificates?
Very good points. I've come to believe that nowadays just about everything is a racket of some sort. Business, religion, politics (obviously), whatever.
XAlan Burkhart
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Here is a different take about the AV companies profiting from the virus scare (which I believe is real). Recently, a large, mainstream AV company started blocking our customers from downloading our product from our web site. They reported that they had detected a threat in it that they called WS.Reputation.1. But they more than just warned the user; they automatically quarantined the file and told the user that they had deleted it to protect the user's computer. It turns out, you can Google it, that WS.Reputation.1 is not a virus or malware of any kind! It is just this company's way of saying that so few of their customers have downloaded this file that they do not have enough data to know whether or not it has adversely affected those who have downloaded it. It took me over a week to get our installer added to their "white list" for the current version. Now, every time we release an updated version we have to go through the process again of getting it approved and added to their white list. I am wondering if it would be incorrectly marked as infected if I bought a digital signing certificate and signed the code. Oh yeah, guess who is one of the biggest sellers of digital certificates?
That sucks. Sounds like corporate extortion. Stuff like that is why I am not a big fan of AV companies.
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Hi, This year I did not renewed my antivirus subscription with a well known antivirus company, 2 month later l lost all my data due to virus activity, even having a new paid antivirus. Last year, the same I did not renewed my subscription and change to a free antivirus and also after 2 moth I lost my hard drive, also a well known antivirus company. Call my attention these cases so I would like to know if some of you has experienced same lost in similar situation? I suspect that if you do not renew your subscription some hacker will take care of you. Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know. The result in my case it is that I'm changing to mac due to pc is very affected by virus mafia, so I think Microsoft and other pc companies should take this situation seriously, because pc environment will be reduced and mac will grow also linux. thanks, Teo
Hm, i do not face the probs you are facing... my home machine runs avast and my firewall is always off, it happened a long time ago that avast found a potential harmful threat. it selected an appropriate action to take and everything was fine again... maybe switching to mac would solve that particular issue for you, but keep in mind that, on the other hand, it comes with a plethora of other problems (no right mouse, no multimonitor, no hyper v, with virtualization i'm not quite sure at the moment...is there a chance to virtualize machines on an apple..i doubt that, but don't know exactly.., in case of the newer apple-products which all have to be sooo ultrathin, the accumulator is GLUED to the mainboard, not screwed in order to save some space...that is to name a few) and as steve mayfield stated, the mac is no longer in 'safe mode'... ;-) nice regards, clodetta
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On the other hand, McAfee, while being good, is itself one of the worst culprits for interfering with system operation, sometimes so bad that the system might as well be bricked cause it is unusably slow. It's too bad that antivirus software is sometimes almost as bad as the software it is protecting you against. mvarey
Years ago (10 or so, not exactly sure), McAfee was a corporate standard where I worked. Piece of crap, slow, and buggy. And it even caused problems with Visual Studio ... a really weird bug that prevented a drop down list box from showing up on a project. Needless to say, McAfee didn't last long on my team's PCs.
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Hi, This year I did not renewed my antivirus subscription with a well known antivirus company, 2 month later l lost all my data due to virus activity, even having a new paid antivirus. Last year, the same I did not renewed my subscription and change to a free antivirus and also after 2 moth I lost my hard drive, also a well known antivirus company. Call my attention these cases so I would like to know if some of you has experienced same lost in similar situation? I suspect that if you do not renew your subscription some hacker will take care of you. Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know. The result in my case it is that I'm changing to mac due to pc is very affected by virus mafia, so I think Microsoft and other pc companies should take this situation seriously, because pc environment will be reduced and mac will grow also linux. thanks, Teo
I would go further and change Mac to a microwave, since MW has no viruses at all. From my 22 years experiense I was infected may be 2-3 times, NEVER EVER having any antivirus software. Why? Just same principle like you wash hands every time before eating: 1. NEVER run any exe/com/bat coming from email. Even if it comes from your mom. ESPECIALLY if it come from your mom. 2. Switch off any web-sh*t like a flash, music, video. Disallow JS to change windows shape (Opera can do it best way). 3. Always check any DVD you've bought, esp. pirate. 4. Never click any banner, "earn here" and so on shitylinks. 5. Put some firewall to control every cr@p accessing IN. I use BWMeter, it's enough. 6. Keep archives of everything priceless like your photo with american flag - on a separate HDD or flash. Never ever use for backup cr@p like CD/DVD - it's unreliable and it's dead. Like this!
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Hi, This year I did not renewed my antivirus subscription with a well known antivirus company, 2 month later l lost all my data due to virus activity, even having a new paid antivirus. Last year, the same I did not renewed my subscription and change to a free antivirus and also after 2 moth I lost my hard drive, also a well known antivirus company. Call my attention these cases so I would like to know if some of you has experienced same lost in similar situation? I suspect that if you do not renew your subscription some hacker will take care of you. Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know. The result in my case it is that I'm changing to mac due to pc is very affected by virus mafia, so I think Microsoft and other pc companies should take this situation seriously, because pc environment will be reduced and mac will grow also linux. thanks, Teo
Mac's attitude to antivirus is don't go to that site. They don't have any form of antivirus as such. On Windows, if you don't run as an admin user, it is the same as running Linux or a Mac. It is just that most people choose to run as admin users even though they don't need to. If you're not an administrator, you can't install anything: problem solved. As for hta and Office viruses, that is something else.
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Teo Gaona wrote:
Can the antivirus Co. be involved, dont know, only if there is data of same cases can we know.
I have occasionally wondered if it wouldn't be in the interest of commercial outfits like Symantec to keep us all paranoid about viruses. Regardless, there are plenty of bad guys out there who genuinely want to take over computers to do their deeds. I haven't used a commercial AV program in years (I use the free version of Avast). I've been hit with one virus, ever. Back in 1999 I unthinkingly opened an email attachment from a friend in spite of it having no extension. McAfee allowed it to run, and it took 2 days to get my machine cleaned up. She had no clue her computer had just emailed a virus to everyone in her Outlook address book.
XAlan Burkhart
It's paranoia, but i think is justified, in my entire life i have not caught any virus in any of my computers, however when i was a student, my friends and classmates have their computers filled with viruses, also the computers outside the campus (public ones), had a lot of viruses. In an envorment like that i think the need of an antivurs is justified; althought some very basic things can make it unnecessary, for example i usually disable autorun, autoplay and auto whatever function comes in Windows, also i only open removable drives in the folder view of the Windows Explorer (the folder tree on the left), as this way autorun files are not executed; and also sometimes i do the world a favor and i have Windows' hidden files visible so i can see any suspect file and delete it.
CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...
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I personally use NOD32, which seems to have the lowest performance impact and a high capture rating in testing. I also use a program (Host Manager) that blocks most ad and malicious sites through your hosts file. Apple has recently had to up it's anti virus game since it's market share is reaching the point that the bad guys are attacking iOS systems. So a switch to a Mac is only a delaying tactic not a solution. But as pointed out above - visits to questionable web sites and falling for the fake "You have a problem click here" is by far the main source of problems.
Macs are no longer secure!?, i don't know what to believe in now… ;P
CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...
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Try Microsoft Security Essentials. It is free and it works. Job done!
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
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Mac's attitude to antivirus is don't go to that site. They don't have any form of antivirus as such. On Windows, if you don't run as an admin user, it is the same as running Linux or a Mac. It is just that most people choose to run as admin users even though they don't need to. If you're not an administrator, you can't install anything: problem solved. As for hta and Office viruses, that is something else.
Man there are a very simple solution for your problem... 1st you have to find the root of your problem... is it the internet?! easy find your DSL/Cable modem take the cable/wire that comes form the outside and unplug it get a condom, the extra thinner ones, and wrap around the connector and plug it back in without ripping it, its very hard to do probably its going to take a few tries but then you protected of yourself, the condom if you are able to get it win and plug the cable without ripping it will isolate the physical contact between both side making sure that the connection will not reach the infected path or others... Being realistic now for me MSE has been enough for years, and only need when opening something that I doubt and I am not talking about everyday stuff... surfing the internet and malware and pretty good usually evaluation my clicks and had no troubles, but if you allow other people to use the pc that can be trouble that why I don't... a have a 2nd old pc for that where I also try the stuff that I don't trust... if I understand you are a programmer, as a programmer you should be a little more smart about this subject and the online selection you make and software you download or trust, not even my wife or in-laws get that amount of virus or malware