Despite OS shields up, half of America opts for third-party antivirus – just in case Nearly half of Americans are using third-party antivirus software and the rest are either using the default protection in their operating system – or none at all. In all, 46 percent of almost 1,000 US citizens surveyed by the reviews site Security.org said they used third-party antivirus on their computers, with 49 percent on …
Back in the day when I worked for a small ISP (think '99, '00) we got frequent calls from people who had installed Norton. It had this system whereby it would change the mail server settings in Outlook Express. It was then meant to pass through this info to Norton, so that emails were scanned as they arrived.
It never worked, and instead, users just had borked email settings, which we had to explain how to manually restore.
> we got frequent calls from people who had installed Norton.
Had to deal with a friends system this morning, it had Norton AntiTrack installed, in its default install it would not let me send an email address in a password reset form, regardless of whether I had enabled/disabled it on a specific website. Solution: remove extension from browser.
A friend had a Dell all-in-one which had been upgraded to Windows 10. He also had one of the first large refillable ink tank Epson printers. We live in Australia so we get Patch Tuesday before many and, almost every month, it borked the printer. It would work with his iPhone 8, so definitely an MS problem. Sometimes removing and re-installing McAfee fixed it, generally it required reinstalling and setting up the printer drivers. After removing McAfee and using the MS native AV, he was "only" getting problems with paper sizes etc. He is in his late 80s and one of his hobbies is photography. I'm retired and have just spent an interesting couple of days looking through his large collection of JPG files (exiftools, etc.), then after writing a few shell scrips and using a couple of FOSS tools, removed the obvious duplicates - Followed by a bit of visual inspection based on dates and file sizes. We got it down to a manageable 20+ thousand images. He bought a new printer, and now has a new iPad 10. So far it has been much easier to help him become confident with the iPad than to work out and remind him which of the 5 ways he used to print and edit his photos. It probably helps that he has had the iPhone for a few years, but yesterday the Dell was consigned to the garage on its way to the local computer charity.
or who simply clicked a button as part of the hardware / software specification when buying
And how many of those were fooled into clicking the "subscribe" button for the pay version and when presented with a screen requesting payment just went ahead and gave their card info instead of looking for a "back" button to go back to the previous screen and locating the tiny little text in a corner that says "continue with free version"
"...mainstream operating systems have security code baked in." With the endless stream of CVEs and "patches" coming from mictosoft as well as its built in spyware, I wouldn't trust the baked in security to display "Hello, world". As I've said before, common sense and Norton are all I've ever used or needed to protect my systems. 99% of security problems are caused be PEBKAC.
To be fair, once you've loaded a Norton product on, the PC is fairly well defended against the meat-sack in the chair. The machine will now be so damn painfully slow, they won't have the patience to wait and see what happens when they load their newly acquired 'edit PDFs for FREE NOW' bit of software they got from one of the 800 links that say DOWNLOAD on download.com (hint, it's the one you can't see).
Back in the day (the 90's and early noughties) I spent years 'undefended', or my PCs did, because I reached the end of my tether with the overall crapness of various supposed 'anti-virus (please_sit_back_and pay_while_we_take_over_and_drive_your_OS_performance_into_the ground) software' that I had installed over several earlier years.
In all those undefended years none of my PCs got infected (and yes, folks, they were indeed connected to the nasty internet). I'm sure there was a degree of luck involved (and I was certainly not an inviting target), I'm also sure that at that time the risk of infection was being highly overblown (for perfectly good commercial reasons, of course).
Those Windows years are long behind me now.
> they were indeed connected to the nasty internet
The problems were more to do with Windows systems being directly connected to the Internet, hence the rise of the personal firewall, with Microsoft - as usual following the trend set by third-parties - releasing a very basic firewall in XP which was replaced by the slightly more functional Windows Firewall in XP2. Compared to products such as Agnitum Outpost Firewall, the Windows Firewall was and still is a joke. Which has also been the way with many Windows features: sufficient to tick the box and so make life difficult for the more capable third-party products…
Any firewall that is installed on the device will have it's vulnerabilities. The router, or before it, would be a better place. It needs to have the ability to black hole IPs/addresses, as well as not allowing traffic from specified local devices. Ex. I never want my security cameras sending traffic outside my LAN. Block specific ports in/out. And traffic logging.
The problem is that many home users get their routers from their ISP. (note: these routers are snooping on your local network and sending it to the ISP) Having a true, effective firewall also takes more work and additional knowledge. Yet another device to keep updated and configured.
A personal anecdote: the only machine I have had hacked (rooted) from the Internet was OpenBSD. A very long time ago. It was because of the belief at the time that BSD was secure, unlike Windows.
I have several machines ranging from Win 7 to Linux and the latest from MS. I'm running Trend Micro on all of them that will run it. I guess it's force of habit but also a bit of peace of mind. OS's seem to take forever to catch up to the latest viruses.
Another grey beard here. Back in the day I had to visit all my company's sites to install Dr Solomon's anti virus on all the DOS machines. It came to light that some naughty individuals brought games in on floppy disk to run on their work computer! Tut, tut! The occasional relatively lame virus had started making their way onto the machines. So the order came from on high. "Anti virus installation on every PC and a ban on bringing in unauthorised disks."
The habit stuck with me for all Windows PC's until I retired and switched entirely to Linux Mint at home. Always felt a little uneasy at the lack of availability of anti-virus software for it. I run Clam-TK occasionally, but over a decade have only encountered two or three Windows viruses in email attachments. Never had an infection from a Linux virus or Linux malware, though I'm sure there are some out there. Is there an anti-virus you'd recommend for Linux Mint, or is the chance of infection diminishingly small?
The ClamAV core will be enough, just install a version that does periodic scans, perdiodic signature downloads and monitors removable storage and downloads.
do not leave your ClamAV on manual-only mode.
as for macos (my main desktop AND laptop) since its built in antimalware tools are laughable atbest, I use sophos free, but mostly out of habit. Again, any third party antimalware tool is better than apple's buil-in.
as for windows, the builtin ms-security essentials/win-defender/whatever is called today built-in anti malware is decent enough, unless you want the support and handholding ofd the paid options, and/or need some other pieces of the paid security bundle
Dustbinned DOS and its offspring long ago. Took up relationship with the fruity OS. SIMM card hacked once, a friend hacked back with Mac OS 6 or 7 and fixed that for them. Otherwise smooth albeit wide awake aware sailing. Try Objective See free (but please $upport) tools on Mac. Good stuff.
I'd be interested to see "classic" linux distributions compared to the new immutable variants when it comes to security, virus, spyware, malware and such.
Immutable variants are a bit more locked down and restrict usage even to those having root password, but as long as your needed applications are in their software store it could make a good basic internet surfing machine. I wonder if it is worth the trouble.
> Most VPN houses try to tout “security” as a reason, to frighten people, which *generally* is bullcrap due to, as you note, HTTPS.
Clever marketing, though.[1]
If people actually look up anything technical about VPNs they learn that they *are* useful to provide security: if you want to access LAN-based services when away from your LAN, use a VPN to get *into* your LAN without risking opening up the whole thing to the 'Net.
So now the ads tell you that you obviously need a third-party VPN to safely go *out* of your LAN...
[1] cf the well-known use of "Clever girl" just before something you'd rather not be a part of occurs...
Well, yeah, Linux gets malware, but I have a much better understanding of what is going on in Linux. "Oh hey, people are banging on my SSH port. fail2ban is getting a workout."
And I can look at pstree and know what each process is doing (I don't run systemd)
With Windows, it's "WTAF is it doing? Is that normal? Oops, looks like something is broken! Why is it not responding again? Why did Outlook just go away? Why is the disk activity light on permanently now?"
I have been lucky enough to not have malware on Windows, but you sure as hell couldn't tell it from the way the machine was running.
I've been running Linux of one kind of another for almost 25 years. Had a public-facing server for about 20 of those, and have had a desktop and laptops for 10+. No antivirus/antimalware on any of them (but I do use adblockers). Number of malware infections: 0. Number of times I've been hacked: 1. (Created account with easily-guessible username, and password same as username, set to expire on login. User never logged in, but somebody guessed it a couple years later.)
In that same timeframe, I had a couple of Windows machines get infected. At least one was from a bad ad on a legitimate website. As I haven't had a Windows machine for 10+ years, I'd say Linux shows far, far better history.
I recently checked out Norton, McAfee and Avast.
All 3 hijacked the search engine and/or default browser. The search results added so many sponsored results INCLUDING support scams.
All 3 premium apps still suggested that the protection wasn't optimal, and tried to sell extras - such as driver updaters, Privacy protection tools, and so on.
If a user believed it all, bought all the extras, and then allowed it to renew at full price - all 3 were in the region of £300/year.
If a user believed it all, bought all the extras, and then allowed it to renew at full price - all 3 were in the region of £300/year.
It would cost much more than that, because the 'protection' software would eat up so much resources that they'd have to upgrade their PCs more often. I have had new corporate laptops where the 'security' software used 50% of the CPU and bottlenecked the disk IO. (then refuse to let you run the app you just compiled because the EXE signature isn't in their database)
There used to be an organization that rated various AV products. I haven't looked for them in 30 years, back when I beta'd for a Norton competitor. Not sure if they still exist. Norton and McAfee had never been rated better than mediocre. I now use Microsoft Defender on my Windows machines, but I don't rely on it. At least I know it's not going to be sold off to a less than reputable party without notice. It's just a layer of defense in addition to good security practices.
The question I have; we rely on walled garden app stores for security, in the belief that they are curated. Knowing that 'good enough' is the doctrine of corporations, should we be trusting OS stores to be free of malware? One practice I consider shady is you can pay to have your app listed above official ones. Example, say you search for walmart, but the official Walmart app isn't at the top of the list.
You are right, of course. But at least check some decent software, not the worst AV software in the world. Have a look at NOD32 or F-secure.
Also, as a general rule, consider that every software that comes with a new computer is crap. Avoid it and find a different solution.
I started arguing about the need of a good AV/security whether free open source or commercial back in Apple G5 days and the only thing I got was to figure that I was living in a cult.
I just wonder one thing. Here is Microsoft coming with insane ideas like recording every screenshot, uploading OS/behaviour information for advertising, coming up with insanely stupid security issues that were used as advantage by the NSA etc. Somehow, a single department of this company consists of genius developers who can understand and take care of all state level actor sponsored malware, so there isn't any need of an alternative, secondary opinion.
Are we collectively believing this? Think of the most advanced malware, so advanced that people did TED talks covering them. Who spotted them? Windows Defender Team?
> Who spotted them? Windows Defender Team?
Have the Windows Defender Team ever been the first to report a new malware exploit?
The problem we have with a vendors own AV, is that there is no incentive to give advanced warning, only to issue a fix. As we’ve seen with MS over the years, they have disclosed less and less with the monthly security update containing the helpful statement “fixes a number of security bugs”.
Also we need the likes of Kaspersky who aren’t beholden to some government agency and so can flag back doors and exploits that some would rather we didn’t know about…
Get where you are coming from and in general agree in the current political climate, security products such as F-Secure are increasingly attractive, particularly to those who aren’t resident in the US.
I suggested Kaspersky, due to their stance prior to the current state of politics, not saying they are perfect etc. however, with Windows we have an OS that is developed under the influence of one government block and hence may contain back doors at the request of that government. Having a security suite beholden to another government block means they generally have an interest in making life difficult for the other government block and thus will monitor or even block the unpublished back doors, hence the overall System security should be better than if you had the OS and security suite subject to oversight by the same government block…
However, due to the trusted remote access all security sites have to your system, there are additional problems arising from having different governments involved, particularly ones who seem to be increasingly belligerent towards each other…
Over the far too many years of working in IT and related fields, I have had too many bad experiences with AV systems. As a consequence, Symantec (including Norton, Avast, Avira, AVG) and McAfee will never get used on any of my systems, nor any of those I have any influence over. Some of these reasons are historical and relate to over-zealous heuristic scanners causing problems with legitimate files along with files being scanned DESPITE them being in folders that have been excluded, but mostly due to them getting fat and slow. I have had BitDefender on my home systems for several years now with no problems other than the occasional nag to use their VPN. The cost is reasonable if you don't use their "convenient" online renewal and instead buy a MUCH cheaper license from an Amazon seller. Kaspersky used to be a favourite of mine but over the years their system got bloated and slower, so I switched to Bitdefender. At work Sophos & F-Secure are my favourites.
> ... looks like the recently enacted ban on Kaspersky software in the US won't hurt the Russian security shop much. Only four percent of survey participants actually paid for it and three percent used the free version.
Does not follow. The size of the US market and the relative strength of US currency means that an "only four percent" slice of pie could be massive wealth to Kasperski. Taking less optimistic numbers than the article, I figure Kasperski might have been grossing $200 Million ($200,000,000) from the US market, pre-ban(*). But even say $100M. No matter how large their global income is, losing $100M has to hurt.
(*)2020 revenue claimed at $700M. (Goes to Kaperski in India?)
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