http://chuvakin.blogspot.com/2007/04/answer-to-my-antivirus-mystery-question.html As I've been saying for quite some time: you hobble your system for protection against all the OLD viruses that are not likely to endanger you anyway. Even running definition updates every 30 minutes is not going to make a difference here. And, provided that the virus IS found, it is definitely in doubt that you can do anything to fix broken files. AV software definitely isn't going to go back in time and "unsend" any sensitive info that a virus may have phoned home. The best protection is safe user habits, up-to-date software patches (OS, browser, etc), and using a NON ADMINISTRATOR account.
MacAfee has been driving me nuts with automatic updates lately. Seems every time a sit down at the comp for the last week, there's a fucking "please reboot for MacAfee updates to take effect!" flag up. And yet, after that started, I started getting this bloody random "TARGETED" ad window pop-up that won't freaking stop!
Indeed. I'm now virus killer free too as they really don't get what's the threat at the moment: spyware. I'll do an Ad-Aware/Spybot double whammy sweep every week or so and all is good. The classic virus is dying while organized 'net crime tries to zombiefy our computers for profit. The virus killer makers have slept thru that development, obviously. When I had SDBot a while ago, every virus scanner and even spyware cleaner failed until I killed this thing by hand (!) in safe mode. Symantec writes 'Threat Containment: Easy' on their site, yet every program I tried failed miserably, including their own.
Eh, I don't know about that... there's certain improvements in security in OS X 10.5 which are likely to make it back to *BSD and Linux (I think some are in Solaris already) that make it a lot harder to exploit vulnerabilities in order to do anything worse than making an application crash. I'll be happy to describe one big one in more detail as soon as Leopard ships, but for now I am bound by NDA from the WWDC.
Sophos is a small but very good anti-virus and spyware program. They use it for Google's email system, Gmail. It rated very highly in all of the reviews I've read. Here's one from ITPro: http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/06/itpro.html If I didn't get my antivirus and spyware protection for free I'd probably go with Sophos.
Well, it's important to remember that malware includes viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, adware, blah, blah, blah. You'll find that anything that tries to nail all of those to the wall is going to do a pretty shoddy job at all of them. That's where the real problem lies. Instead of focusing on one field, all the companies have really spread themselves too thin. And I think you'll find that this moves beyond the big companies like McAfee and Symantec as well. Honestly, I can't blame them for trying. It's an absurdly competitive industry, and it's one that changes a lot very quickly. The focus really does swing wildly from spyware to viruses and back again. Not only that, they're dealing with complete computer neophytes and some rather technically competant people. It's a very difficult sliding scale to deal with.
You don't know about it until it's tried, but quite frankly, it's not going to be tried. Not enough interest in Mac/Linux within the general computing world for it to matter. I hate my gf's Macbook pro. Damn thing gets so stupidly hot, that if you were sitting and waiting for a plane and actually had it on your 'lap', it'd burn your legs. Though, this thread isn't about that at all, so sorry for straying off topic. I use AVG Anti-virus, however I never have the active av shield or whatever it's called running. I scan about once a week, just to make sure, but other than that it's not running. Sure, when I reboot it'll update, but at least when it updates it doesn't have to reboot.
