Hi Tom
You are on track, but one thing I will give in defence of freeware
malware protection, is MS Security Essentials. It along with the MS
firewall built in and Windows Defender built in and activated fully with
MSSE installed, make for a not bad system. And you are correct, MS I am
sure are fully aware of their exploitable code/bugs/weaknesses, not
necessary found by themselves, but by very clever honest and dishonest
malware practitioners out there. With personal experience, usage and
fighting a good fight, my trust of AVG has waned big time, and MSSE is
now top, as I said for freeware. One must remember freeware tools are
not strong with active protection and scanning of your system, plugged
in devices and email, this is where MSSE does excel.
In this order, I mention a Linux scanner that is now ported to MS, as
it's not bad and totally opensource.
Freeware
1. MSSE
2. Avast
3. ClamAV for Windows
For payware there is only two, by continuous test, both personal,
business and enterprize, and without starting a flame war
Kaspersky
ESET Nod32
Regards
Andrew Brown
On 06/08/2013 04:30 PM, Tom Davies wrote:
Hi :)
Good point. I only had the anti-malware stuff running. None of the
usual other windows open.
On Windows machines i typically have 2 running.
1. Microsoft Security Essentials, the one that kinda forces it's
way onto your system through automatic updates and stuff even if you
don't want it
2. A free one. Usually AVG in the company where i kinda work. In
a different place i might be using a different one but AVG seems
reasonably ok to me.
On machines that are desperately slow running like that i switch off
one or the other. Usually the MS one because i still don't
completely trust it yet.
The number 1 job of any malware has to be to either knock-out the
anti-malware stuff or find a way to permanently bypass it without
raising any alarms. So anti-malware stuff needs to think in a very
different way from whatever in-built security might be around. I
don't have any confidence in MS being able to do that. I think a
3rd party program is more likely to have different structures. On
the other hand MS might have more of an idea where all their most
well-known flaws are and might be able to structure their one to
deal with likely threats. So, who knows which is going to be best
in the next years or so.
Regards from
Tom :)