Recently I got my hands on a new laptop and during the initiation process, I got to the part of which antivirus software to use. Which one do you use and why? Have you considered or tried any open source ones as ClamAV or Open AntiVirus Project?
Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#2ChromeOS
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#3Windows 10 comes with defender which is sufficient for my needs.
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#4Malwarebytes Anti Malware (MBAM). It is exceptional for a free tool. Windows Defender is too simplistic for my liking, with a very small filter list.
That being said, I run ComboFix + ADWCleaner + RKill + JunkwareRemovalTool every few weeks to remove any malware that may have creeped in.
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#5I typically ride bare. AV software just doesn't feel good.
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#6When in the US or EU : Kaspersky or 360.
When in China: Mcafee or F-Secure.
Etc.
All big commercial names are sufficient; just not at keeping nation states out of your machine.
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#7Depends on usage. Going to browse sketchy websites all day? Probably need something.
Just doing dev work on Linux and also Thinking before clicking(TM)? Probably CommonSense2018(C) will be enough.
Keep in mind that AV software also runs as very high authority on a system, and they all had serious vulnerabilities, annoying popups, etc.
A lying DNS + IP blacklist could also help protect you. see for UNIX-like systems e.g. https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/blackhole & https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/lie-to-me
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#8Don't use AV because it's slow and annoying. But I do use sandboxie (1) for untested programs and that takes care of most of the problems.
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#9Linux.
In all seriousness though: without knowing anything about state of the art AV software I question how effective even big brand software is without compromising your own operating system integrity these days.
Whenever I encountered cases of an infected system in the last 5 years or so it was nothing regular AV software could have caught anyway. Specific tools had to be downloaded for removal and if you put this in contrast to the annoying number of false positives you start to question the effectiveness. I imagine all of this is of course highly subjective.
Re: Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use?
#10I don't use any myself, but if my friends ask me I recommend them Kaspersky. Seems to be working very well for them.