What Security do you use?

Jim2112

bod1467 wrote: »

Agreed. That's why Avast (free) and MBAM (free) are useful.

I hear what you are saying but the "free" versions are nothing more than a worm on a hook offering very limited functionality.

Once your paranoia begins to grow you will almost always end up with a subscription. Granted £29.99 for a year is not much but it is nothing more than a placebo.

Every person I have given security training to over the years is usually astounded how easy it is to keep your computer clean without having to pay. Even started free courses at certain schools and colleges. I'm amazed at how much teenagers already know about I.T.

eeeeeee

british bulldog

Sublime_2

Back to Avast, was using a version of Outpost security suite for a couple of months, I got off giveaway of the day, but seemed to slow my pc down somewhat.

Happier with avast, spywareblaster, and windows firewall. I also have Anvir taskmanager a full version, (not the free one) which I got through a dottech promo.

Alexd_2

AVG is definitely the way to go. It seems to have done the job with my laptop that has been fixed countless number of times.

WarioTBH

Avast Free is pretty brilliant considering its free, you get so many features that AVG / Microsoft Security Essentials dont.

dieselglider

I was using Avast for a couple of years without a problem, but have now ditched it in favour of AVG. Reason? Because, now having FTTC broadband, the 'network' and 'web' shields were causing download speeds to fall down to around 10Mbps +/- 2Mbps, from 20Mbps on wireless 'b'. Now getting the full flow again. I Googled and found some others reporting slow downs too.

Just something to be wary of, I had no issues when on Max adsl.

somersethillbilly

dieselglider wrote: »

I was using Avast for a couple of years without a problem, but have now ditched it in favour of AVG. Reason? Because, now having FTTC broadband, the 'network' and 'web' shields were causing download speeds to fall down to around 10Mbps +/- 2Mbps, from 20Mbps on wireless 'b'. Now getting the full flow again. I Googled and found some others reporting slow downs too.

Just something to be wary of, I had no issues when on Max adsl.

You cannot have been getting 20Mbps on wireless "b", the max speed for "b" is 11Mbps.

dieselglider

Sorry should've said 11g.

The above post related to my Win XP netbook, but it occurred to me that my desktop pc upstairs (Win XP) was also pretty poor regarding download speeds, so I did the same antivirus swap and got a similar result.

Robisere

Bit Defender Internet Security.
Win 7 Firewall off, Router and BitDef firewalls on.
BitDef runs the Network better than Windows does. Easy to set up. Used to have Kaspersky, but it became so complicated and the Support came equipped with a deafening silence.
Also have Rapport, which is great for financial security.

EDIT: Jim2112 must wear a black Stetson to work.

GraceCourt

BAA1 wrote: »

And if anyone takes any notice of your not so wise words then :rotfl::T:rotfl:

Actually, don't be too quick to ignore it.

Software firewalls (including the built-in Windows version): Frankly, useless... the trend was started by "ZoneAlarm", but as this type of "defence" comes from software that's on your computer, do you really want this to be the battleground between good and evil? Far better that you have a proper hardware firewall: preferably (and I accept that it's beyond most average users) configured to block unrecognised traffic both inbound and outbound. Microsoft's "Firewall" will happily watch gigabytes of spam e-mails being sent out from an infected zombie PC because it ignores all outbound traffic!

Anti-virus and other anti-malware packages: Great, if you like to access risky sites or download iffy software as long as you realise that it will be a case of "when", not "if", you get infected. Even the best heuristics-based anti-malware software can miss zero-day exploits (those about which it doesn't know) - you should, as was pointed out, change your user behaviour to have the best chance of avoiding infection.

Or... stop using Windows!

I use no anti-malware software whatsoever, if you don't count "NoScript" in my FireFox browser for protection against scripts being run whilst I'm browsing that I don't want to run. With a hardware firewall between my networks and the internet, and SuSE Linux on my laptop and almost all of my PCs (some run other distributions, such as Centos and Ubuntu, or a utility distribution such as FreeBSD 7.3 on my FreeNAS file servers), I've never even given viruses a second thought... there are none - lots of malware, if you are daft enough to install it as root, and all software has vulnerabilities, but not a single virus - because under Linux, self-replication of malware isn't possible: such vectors only exist in Windows because of accidental or deliberate serious security shortcomings, like the preview windows in Outlook and Outlook Express.

In fact, as I use ClamAV (free and, of course, Open Source) on my mail server to filter out e-mail messages bearing Windows viruses, I sometimes filch these infected messages out from quarantine to open and look at, perfectly safely, to play with and to examine to see how they are put together.

But I wouldn't touch a Windows PC with a barge pole - they are fundamentally flawed, because no Windows OS has a properly-designed security model (and never will until it is re-written from scratch), and I'm too comfortable with my PCs just running and running without falling over. And as Linux is a true multiuser OS, if an application hangs, I just log in again as the same user to the same PC using another shell, to have a look to see what the problem is, and fix it - simples!

Try doing that* with Windows!

Oh, and there is no version of Trusteer for Linux... why would one be needed?

* You can't, of course...