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Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2009 11:30 am
by SFSxOI
Yeah, the on line scanners are OK for that occaisional file but they miss replacing or substituting for client based av products by a long shot.

Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2009 11:54 am
by talisman
SFSxOI wrote:Yeah, the on line scanners are OK for that occaisional file but they miss replacing or substituting for client based av products by a long shot.
However they can give a very good figure of how AV products compete with each other. Sometimes I get calls from friends with malfunctioning PCs and I tell them to bring their PCs over here so I can have a look at them... Oh you don't believe how many trojans, viruses and backdoors I have treated! At the same time I make copies of the viruses and put them on my USB stick, since I'm using Linux I don't have much to worry about. I then upload these viruses to Jotti or similar and compare how AV products identify the viruses. Most of the time both commercial and free AV can identify my submissions, but sometimes not. They are not meant to replace AV product as a whole anyway.

Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2009 2:12 pm
by SFSxOI
talisman wrote:
SFSxOI wrote:Yeah, the on line scanners are OK for that occaisional file but they miss replacing or substituting for client based av products by a long shot.
However they can give a very good figure of how AV products compete with each other. Sometimes I get calls from friends with malfunctioning PCs and I tell them to bring their PCs over here so I can have a look at them... Oh you don't believe how many trojans, viruses and backdoors I have treated! At the same time I make copies of the viruses and put them on my USB stick, since I'm using Linux I don't have much to worry about. I then upload these viruses to Jotti or similar and compare how AV products identify the viruses. Most of the time both commercial and free AV can identify my submissions, but sometimes not. They are not meant to replace AV product as a whole anyway.
The only way to reliably test or compare AV products is to test them in an actual 'normalized' environment under known controlled conditions. The comparison between AV detection from two differing environments with one or both being uncontrolled, even though the results may give the "expected" answer, is not reliable enough to depend upon as a standard. Web based scanners, although they seem to do the job and do for the most common, usually fail by at least 20% or more below client based products when subjected to a full battery of tests.

Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2009 7:24 pm
by talisman
"very good figure" <> "100% accurate"

Don't get heated, mate! :D

Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2009 8:55 pm
by SFSxOI
what are you talking about?

Re: Vipre antivirus

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:51 pm
by utopiomania
As I said, MS Security Essentials is installed, and is probably the best one that I have have used yet.

And a from a test today, its one out of three packages that gets a 'Good' on both malware and viruses
out of 26 tested programs, only the MS effort is completely FREE.

Highly recommended.

Re: Vipre antivirus

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 11:48 pm
by SFSxOI
Yep, the MS Security Essentials is actually a pretty good product especially considering that its free and a very first attempt at a package like this from Microsoft. Are you in the continuing beta for it?