AV and anti-malware

AlecEiffel

Hi all,

I've been a loyal McAfee user for many years (by loyal I mean it has been given to me for free by a string of ISPs, computer manufacturers, and banks).

I've now moved away from it (pay for it? Pah!) and am currently rocking W8 Windows Defender, W8 firewall, and Malwarebytes.

Are these a reasonable combo for decent security?

Malwarebytes always receives praise so I'm happy with that. Is Defender a decent choice and is the W8 firewall strong enough (I'm not stupid or a p*rn fiend but I do surf beyond MSE and the BBC).

Cheers.

Laz123

MS Security Essentials is a beefed-up version of Defender so it would give you much better protection. I used Avast free for years but now I've switched to MSE on 2 machines and no probs.

closed

malwarebytes free is an after the event cleanup tool, useful, but won't protect you.

avast free is better than mse/defender (same thing)

don't worry about extra firewalls

disk image backup is the ultimate protection

AlecEiffel

Laz123 wrote: »

MS Security Essentials is a beefed-up version of Defender so it would give you much better protection.

Hi and thanks for your reply.

On W8 Defender is the same as Security Essentials on W7 and Vista. MS removed the original Defender as used in Vista and W7, added Security Essentials by default, and called it Defender.

AlecEiffel

closed wrote: »

malwarebytes free is an after the event cleanup tool, useful, but won't protect you.

avast free is better than mse/defender (same thing)

don't worry about extra firewalls

disk image backup is the ultimate protection

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah I use Malwarebytes as a 'second opinion' scan, and cleanup tool should it ever be needed, so I'm fine with it not being an ongoing protection tool.

Cool, good to know the firewall is good enough.

Will have a look at Avast also.

ballyblack

Avast comes out good here in a test;

http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/avc_factsheet2013_08.pdf

NewFolder

AlecEiffel wrote: »

Hi all,

I've been a loyal McAfee user for many years (by loyal I mean it has been given to me for free by a string of ISPs, computer manufacturers, and banks).

I've now moved away from it (pay for it? Pah!) and am currently rocking W8 Windows Defender, W8 firewall, and Malwarebytes.

Are these a reasonable combo for decent security?

Malwarebytes always receives praise so I'm happy with that. Is Defender a decent choice and is the W8 firewall strong enough (I'm not stupid or a p*rn fiend but I do surf beyond MSE and the BBC).

Cheers.

Defender is pretty much as good as any paid-for AV. It is very slow though, a full scan on my desktop (1.1TB) takes about 6 hours, on my laptop (80gb) it takes over 12 hours.

However, with any antivirus software, the best solution is to not get viruses. I haven't ever had a virus on my own computers. Consider using an ad blocker (some rather evil people use banner ads to imitate legitimate site content, but actually download malware to your PC when clicked!) and don't download stuff that looks dodgy, and you should be fine regardless of the AV you use.

Windows Firewall has mixed reviews, some people say it's works better than other firewalls due to it being integrated into the OS, other people say it's terrible. Either way, if you have some sort of router in between you and the internet, you'll probably be protected by NAT, which will prevent anything from accessing your computer via the internet, unless you manually open ports on it.

Malwarebytes is an excellent piece of software, but is more suited to repairing a known infection, rather than detecting or preventing one from occurring, it's used in addition to an AV product, rather than instead of one.

I'd say it was a very reasonable combo. As good as, if not better than, stuff that you have to pay for!

esuhl

Spybot and SpywareBlaster are quite handy -- they block malware domains from being accessed by your web browser. Spybot also scans for malware like MalwareBytes' software does.

The Firefox add-on, AdBlock Plus (which is intended to block adverts) has a "malware domains" list which you can subscribe to.

If you need a better firewall, Comodo works well (so long as you disable "Defense+" and set the firewall to custom mode). The built-in firewall is probably sufficient if you're not a control freak, however!

As for free anti-viruses, I've found Avast to be (currently) much better than either Avira or AVG. Just make sure you do a "custom" installation and don't let it install all the junk that is preselected for a "typical installation".

AlecEiffel

Thanks all for your replies.

Will have a look at Spywareblaster and Spybot also.

I'm fairly savvy on the internet and know what not to click on (never click ads anyway) but of course there's always the driveby downloads if you even just visit a compromised site so want a reasonable package.

Thanks for the input everyone!

esuhl

AlecEiffel wrote: »

I'm fairly savvy on the internet and know what not to click on (never click ads anyway) but of course there's always the driveby downloads if you even just visit a compromised site so want a reasonable package.

The NoScript add-on for Firefox blocks scripts from running by default. You just need to approve each domain (either temporarily until you close the browser or permanently so it remembers which domains are "safe").

That way you can allow scripts from, say, bbc.co.uk, but if you visit unknown-forum.com which secretly runs code from malware.com, the script will be blocked by default. Even if you allow scripts on unknown-forum.com, the malware.com domain will still be blocked.

It offers a great layer of extra protection and control, although it can confuse less technical users who might wonder why a certain site doesn't work automatically or who might allow scripts to run on suitable domains.

https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/noscript/
http://noscript.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript