I just avoided a huge problem with a restore point, somehow somewhere I picked up a nasty virus. One of those ones that pretends its windows security software and wont let you open anything online.
The restore point worked and my windows securities essentials found it and cleaned it up, but I want something that would have stopped me getting it in the first place.
Sadly, nothing is flawless and MSE is pretty much as good as anything else I’ve come across. That said, I’m far from being an expert in the field. I keep MBAM on hand to run a secondary scan, as well, but I only keep MSE active.
If you really want to spend money, the best commercial antivirus programs are ESET NOD32 and Kaspersky. They aren’t markedly superior to the free microsoft security essentials, though.
I suggest you run MSE resident in conjunction with regular scans from malwarebytes anti-malware.
This.
Wish I could figure out how I got the damn virus in the first place as I already was running MSE. It was something called sirefef.b.
This is what I do. I ended up buying malwarebytes and installed it on all my PCs for active protection.
Make sure your virus definitions are up to date in MSE. Also if you have Java, Flash, and Adobe Acrobat keep them updated as well.
OK the person who made that virus needs to DIAF, just found out the system restore lost me 23 levels in dungeon defender and all my godly items.
I have twice picked up that virus from web sites. Once from a sports site using Proboards and once years ago from the Egotastic web site. Same virus. I dl’d nothing, just visited the sites.
I was able to get rid of one (and have never had the problem again) using Spyware Doctor. The other time I had to use the restore point.
I currently run Avast (free) on my computer at home and have never had any problems. AVG was useless in fighting these.
Malware-bytes is good to have as well. It will clean up many a mess.
Malwarebytes is a $25 one-time fee, as opposed to most AVs which are more than that per year. I bought it, and I’m a tightwad. The active protection is good. I also run MSE.
You’re most likely picking up the sites via flash or java, but it could be you also clicked on something to enable them. Like others here I would recommend MSE/MBAM, but since you didn’t mention your OS/Patch level, if you haven’t yet … get off XP. Now. And update flash/java consistently, directly from their site.
I also recommend Chrome. There is a reason it has gone undefeated at the hacker conventions, where as the rest of the browsers rack up exploits.
It has its own internal PDF viewer and version of flash that it keeps up to date, knocking out 2 of the three most common vectors for addon infections. It also has the most fluid update system; Firefox and IE are still trying to match it.
Yeah. If you run firefox (as I do), it’s pretty important to disable java, religiously keep flash up to date, and use an aftermarket non-adobe PDF viewer. I use one called “PDF-XChange Viewer”.
I’m no expert, but I’d say your best bet is either AVG Anti-Virus or as stusser said, Kaspersky. I happen to own both, and they work quite well.
I say this everytime this subject comes up and I will continue to.
Download & run winpatrol you can get it at www.winpatrol.com
It’s freeware. Upgrading to premium lets you see the details on any running service or application. This is very helpful when trying to determine whether something is safe or not.
Basically what WinPatrol does is it will ask your permission to do anything to your computer, whether it be to be in the start program folder, or associating a file type to a new program, or changing the hosts file or whatever.
Having this prompt come up tells you that something is trying to change your computer and it lets you know something is about to get fucked up…if you weren’t installing some software and you expect these prompts to come up.
Get it, install it and set it to alert you on everything. Scotty the watchdog has saved my ass a number of times.
EDIT: This is NOT a anti-virus program…it is a program that alerts you that something is going on that you may not have realized…allowing you to stop the infection before it starts doing damage.
How is that different from having UAC enabled, though?
I have used, and really like, Eset for years now. Great performance, never had any -whoops, we deleted some important shit on you- moments.
Every test I’ve seen always show their heuristic detection being far beyond competing solutions and it updates daily.
Unless they take a sudden, drastic dive in quality, they have my business pretty much locked up.
UAC doesn’t catch jack shit from my experience. I’ve had scotty (scotty is a watchdog that barks and comes up for WinPatrol) come up so many times - and it’s the non-virus things that companies do which piss me off to no end.
Just an example - this week, I decided to upgrade Winamp as I’ve been using an older version for literally 3-4 years. I thought hey might as well update it.
That POS wanted to put itself in my startup folder - so it would run everytime my computer started up. I hate this shit. WinPatrol alerted me to this and let me deny it.
iTunes used to be the poster child for wanting to associate itself with every file type without asking. I don’t run iTunes for the past 3-4 years (or longer, who remembers), but Winpatrol always notifies me when this crap comes up.
The other great thing is Winpatrol explorer (it’s the non-resident toolbox of WinPatrol) and it allows you look at your system from a number of tabs - and if you’re like me and naturally inquisitive - I can examine active or scheduled tasks, and since I’ve upgraded to premium, the PLUS information on these are all at my fingertips.
I’ve stopped many viruses by getting a notice that some program was trying to put itself into my startup folder - checking active tasks, then seeing new tasks just identified today, and killing them in their tracks.
It’s free FFS, install it and run it for a while.
This is not your best bet. AVG was awesome at one time, but has become horrific bloatware now, as bad in its own way as Norton used to be (to Symantec’s credit, they’ve scaled down the bloat and system-hogging of Norton) at last check, AVG was about as awful as it gets for hogging resources. Oh, also? AVG doesn’t do a very good job at detection anymore.
Avoid it.
Norton is much better now - combined with a good modern pc, the whole system hogging thing is a non-issue now.
I use F-secure, but Stussers suggestions are also sound. Both are really good (but Kaspersky is the better). It’s also true that the difference down to a good free tool like MSE isn’t great - you do get more extra utilities with one of the better paid suites.
Here’s a good ranking from some thorough and trustworthy testers (we’ve used them in our magazine several times)