What Anti-virus/firewall/anti-spyware Program Do You Use? - Everything Else

AV/FW - I use Kaspersky Labs Internet Security 6.0 - I've used just about everything else and found this to be the best. Very small footprint, good updates, uses low resources.

Anti-Spyware-Kaspersky does alot, but for deleting tracking cookies, I use CounterSpy & SpyBot-S&D

Anti-Trojan: Trojan Scanner, and TDS-3

I use McAfee Scan and Zone Alarm for Internet. I have always bought McAfee and two weeks ago the wife "Just Had To Have" her own legal copy of McAfee for her new computer. With a big $40 rebate she bought the set of scan/firewall.

Well, low and behold....after opening the firewall disk, it was another copy of the Scan disk! Staples wouldn't even give us another disk the same as it had been opened!! Finally a Staples store in the next city gave us a box of McAfee and all was fine. But..when we get home, we find they put (returned) in a circle over the reciept exactly where we were supposed to circle for the rebate.

Max

I use Norton Systemworks for anti-virus etc. Spybot S&D and AdAware, plus Windows Defender (beta) , are my spy/adware hunters.

Ti-Jean

My anti-virus is AVG free edition and I use Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall. Both downloaded for free when I upgraded from Windows 98 SE to W2000 a few months ago. Thing is now my computer and the Internet are very slow in the first minutes after I turn it on.

I don't want to put any money on this 7 year old Dell PC. W2000 was also free from an earlier work laptop. My only expense was a used 256MB RAM for $45. (PC100 is discontinued). I previously had only 64 MB of RAM. Hoping that 320 MB will get me going another year or 2 before I buy a new PC or laptop.

Just like digicams over the past years, price is inversely proportional to performance. A much better PC will cost just a fraction of what this old Dell cost me in 1999.

Bikeman982

I am using a Dell Inspiron 9100 that I bought from e-Bay.

I used Norton AntiVirusback in the late 90s, but it seemed to run too slow and bog down new computers we got in the early 2000s. We switched to McAfee VirusScan in 2000 and have been using it since.

I used ZoneAlarm Firewall before switching to McAfee Personal Firewall in 2000.

I've used Spybot Search and Destroy (free) since spyware detectors came out.

On my Windows boxes, run Norton AV Corporate ED. Runs a bit better than the Personal variants, plus I only have to update the server and it automatically updates the defn on the clients (not quite as buggy as the auto-update).

Bunch of flavors for spyware scanners - but mostly Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and MS Defender Beta. Zonealarm for the firewall or native Windows OS firewall.

On my Linux box, run Panda AV and on the Mac, Sophos Anti-Virus.

1,424 posts

AV/FW - I use Kaspersky Labs Internet Security 6.0 - I've used just about everything else and found this to be the best. Very small footprint, good updates, uses low resources.
Anti-Spyware-Kaspersky does alot, but for deleting tracking cookies, I use CounterSpy & SpyBot-S&D
Anti-Trojan: Trojan Scanner, and TDS-3

I have to use McAfee. My school went to Cisco Clean Access Agent last year to prevent virus infection on the network. The Clean Access Agant Requires that you have Windows XP SP2 installed with it's security center enabled. It also requires all the latest windows updates and that you have McAfee Virus Scan 8.0i and Spyware plug-in. Then it verifies that you had a virus definition update within the last 48 hours and that a virus scan was completed and your computer was virus free sometime within the last 24 hours.

Unless all these conditions are met, you can't get on the net. So I must have McAfee.

I personally liked my Symantec stuff better, but it's no dice with it on campus.

320 posts

Personally I use a Mac which eliminates the need, BUT I also do some consulting and my current and past experience leads me far away from Norton and MacAfee. They don't do well in comparison tests and tend to be slow and often cause problems. My personal preference is for AVG Antivirus - because it's free and fully functional - but I've also been happy with EZTrust from CA. (AVG is from Grisoft - http://free.grisoft.com/ ).

Personally I use a Mac which eliminates the need, BUT I also do some consulting and my current and past experience leads me far away from Norton and MacAfee. They don't do well in comparison tests and tend to be slow and often cause problems. My personal preference is for AVG Antivirus - because it's free and fully functional - but I've also been happy with EZTrust from CA. (AVG is from Grisoft - http://free.grisoft.com/ ).

What is it about Mac's that makes them seemingly immune from viruses and spy/adware? Or are they? I cannot imagine that any computer used on the internet, which downloads E-mail, programs, photos, etc. from remote sources wouldn't be just as vulnerable as a PC. Does the OS-X operating system have it's own invulnerable security features built in? Or is it just because Mac's represent such a smaller number of computers in use that the virus and spy/adware hackers just don't bother with them? 'splain, Lucy!

Max

Larry- It's a bit of everything you said. It's also the fact that a lot of the people who write these viruses simply don't like Microsoft, so they attack it.

You will start seeing a larger shift toward the Macs and their operating system as they take on a larger and larger share of the market - I'm running Macs, Windows, and Linuxs boxes at home and work - each one has its little "quirks" and vunerabilities, just depends on how you set them up.

Hackers write for maximum exposure...there are 10000x more windoze boxes out there, so that's what the hackers write them for. Believe me, you can write a virus/trojan/malware program for mac or linux just as easily ( relatively speaking ), but since there are sooo many more UNPROTECTED windoze boxes out there, thats what gets the lion share.

BTW, I don't understand why so many people use McAffe..it used to be good..back in the day, but now its such a memory/resource hog, its turned into 'bloatware' ( like Nero IMHO ). Probably because its the cheapest lol ... Panda & Kapersky rock, but Panda had a major finger-pointing issue with SpySweeper, so I use Kapersky.