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Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#31

Post by Already__Taken »

aarongolliver wrote: post #23

Defender has the nasty habit of aggressively scanning new games I download off Steam. There are two occasions where it'll do it: - While it's downloading it seems to scan each chunk. I have a gigabit connection, with defender off I can download at nearly full speed. With it on I can download at about 1MB/s. - While the game loads a level. For example, the intro level to the new Deus Ex took over 10 minutes to load th…

You can give it paths to exempt you know. https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/5924-windows-defender-ex...

Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#32

Post by Neil44 »

WhiteSource1 wrote: post #14
owenwil wrote: post #7

This is my advice to everyone I know that gets a new Windows PC. Windows 10's built-in protection is more than adequate, and catches the majority of bad software - anything more is unnecessary, and many of the AV vendors are predatory.

Which AV vendors are predatory? (Though Kaspersky makes me nervous). What do you think about ESET?

I have 150 ish machines on eset across a few different clients, obviously my experience with it has been very good over the years in all aspects. Eset don't offer the biggest margins but I stick with them because it doesn't cause support issues and I can count the number of infected eset machines I've had to deal with on one hand.

Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#33

Post by _betty_ »

shultays wrote: post #11
chime wrote: post #4

> At best, there is negligible evidence that major non-MS AV products give a net improvement in security. I apologize for present anecdote when data is needed but I manage a Windows network with 100+ users and on a daily basis, Kaspersky catches 5-10 emails from Outlook that have nasty attachments. It prevents my users from opening these innocuous looking but nasty Invoice-Jan-2017.docx files. Without a good AV there…

> Invoice-Jan-2017.docx uh, docx files can hack my PC now? Is this a bug of MS Word or docx format really has ability to become a virus?

normally docx viruses are simply VBA scripts but sometimes they exploit an active x embed or image rendering bug.

However other times things like browsers do dumb stuff:

docx files and silverlight files are both just zip files with completely different structures meaning they can live together in the same file.

IE used to look at txt files that contained html tags and say hmm maybe i should display that as html

that meant on sites that accepted txt and docx uploads (a lot of recruitment sites etc) you could upload a txt file that simply embed the docx as a silverlight component. When the admin looked at the txt file it would run the code as the currently logged in (admin) user.

Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#35

Post by frozenport »

Angostura wrote: post #8
beefhash wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you the target audience for this blog post, though? As far as I can tell, the post talks about one-user setups. I'd argue that the starting point in a corporate environment, where you can assume that users can be quite negligent, is fundamentally different from a one-user setup, especially since I agree that you can't "fix" the user in corporate. You want the e-mails gone, not just a warning about it, but a warni…

I don't see any caveats in the article about the kind of user that the advice is intended for.

In your case, the av can run on the Linux mail server.

Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#36

Post by krylon »

rubbingalcohol wrote: post #13

It's irresponsible to make such a broad claim and back it up with really vague anecdotal evidence. Yes, there are a lot of lousy AV products that are at best a break-even for security, but there are some that don't suck and generally you have to pay for them - what a strange concept. I'm not going to advocate for any particular vendor as I used to work for an AV company (and currently use a product from a competitor)…

> really vague anecdotal evidence

[...]

> I can attest that I've used products that have caught threats that Windows Defender didn't

Since you brought it up, the latter statements sounds suspiciously like the very definition of "really vague anecdotal evidence. SCNR

Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#37

Post by elorant »

I was running a crawler the other day on one of my PCs from a console app. Then suddenly the antivirus discovers that a page is infected, terminates the connection and wrecks havoc to the app which stays hung there for hours and I'm unable to terminate or even kill it from Task Manager. I had to restart the PC for the task to be forcefully killed. Thanks but no thanks. I uninstalled the damn thing the next day. How the fuck did antivirus software became too intrusive?

Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#38

Post by mynameisvlad »

aszantu wrote: post #9

Granny won't believe me :( she feels safer because of some popup that tells her she's safe.

A recent Windows 10 Update (I don't remember which) brought in periodic notifications from Windows Defender. They're not big bright green checkmarks, but it's a step in the right direction.

Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#39

Post by 0xFFC »

It's fucking disaster to read your blog in iphone, please fix it. At least disable fixed width or disable right left surfing. I am not web developer, so i may give wrong suggestions, but please fix you template it is like piece of shit( the experience)

Re: Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software

#40

Post by roca »

chime wrote: post #4

> At best, there is negligible evidence that major non-MS AV products give a net improvement in security. I apologize for present anecdote when data is needed but I manage a Windows network with 100+ users and on a daily basis, Kaspersky catches 5-10 emails from Outlook that have nasty attachments. It prevents my users from opening these innocuous looking but nasty Invoice-Jan-2017.docx files. Without a good AV there…

Email attachments should be scanned by the mail server.
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