It's more like having a doorman that checks everything that comes in and stops it when it recognises someone whos a burglar or notices someone trying to install a spycamera in that precious clock on your mantlepiece.
except they usually just compare the name against a list of known burglars, but utterly fail against new ones. and once the burglar is inside, he may as well just shoot your doorman and go ahead.
trojans that are specifically trying to hide from your scanner aren't unheard of, some even try to disable or uninstall your antivir. Once you foolishly ran the malicious code with your precious admin account, safety's gone.
qFox wrote:
don't open strange (porn or whatever) websites, email, MSN virii links (easily recognisable) and other spooky stuff, you don't _need_ any AV software.
so who's qualified to determine if a site is "strange"?
I've seen well-designed sites trying to send you trojans. There's also been several cases of honest websites delivering trojans because they were either hacked or were displaying infected ads from a major (but sloppy) third-party ad-server.
Unfortunately common sense, even if present, isn't enough.
Oh, and don't forget about certain store-bought sony CDs, something which any reasonable person would have deemed safe.. but then again, no antivir protected against those anyway.
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
Tub wrote:
Raiscan wrote:
It's more like having a doorman that checks everything that comes in and stops it when it recognises someone whos a burglar or notices someone trying to install a spycamera in that precious clock on your mantlepiece.
except they usually just compare the name against a list of known burglars, but utterly fail against new ones. and once the burglar is inside, he may as well just shoot your doorman and go ahead.
Not all antivirus products rely solely on signature-based recognition.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Joined: 3/14/2008
Posts: 152
Location: United Kingdom
Raiscan wrote:
How do you know you're fine if you don't run AV software? And besides, sometimes theres files or information that are required on the dark side of the internet.
Well, no weird processes, in task manager, cpu usage always what I expected it to be, and I did 2 scans (one about 2 weeks ago) with the kaspersky online scanner.
Also *no* chance of a virus some of the time for me because i just set up an xp and mandriva dual boot.
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
Duksandfish wrote:
Raiscan wrote:
How do you know you're fine if you don't run AV software? And besides, sometimes theres files or information that are required on the dark side of the internet.
Well, no weird processes, in task manager, cpu usage always what I expected it to be, and I did 2 scans (one about 2 weeks ago) with the kaspersky online scanner.
Viruses hide themselves in task manager. They can easily name their exe svchost.exe or something, and they don't all use excessive amounts of CPU. Also, I was targetting qFox specifically with the question (the one time I don't put a quote, heh).
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
I use AV and anti-spyware because it gives me peace of mind. Sure, YouTube and GameFAQs aren't going to give me viruses, but that first result in a Google search just might. In fact, that happened to me recently. The very first result was a virus-infested pile of shit that tried to infect me before I could even close the window. Spybot and Ad-Aware both immediately threw red flags, telling me that the site attempted to alter my registry and execute a process.
Spybot and Ad-Aware both immediately threw red flags, telling me that the site attempted to alter my registry and execute a process.
I think that's a clear sign that you should use a better web browser rather than keeping your broken one and rely solely on ad-aware and spybot to keep you safe.
I'm using Firefox, and I haven't heard of any better ones so if you have any suggestions I'm all ears.
And no, I don't use just Spybot and Ad-Aware. I was simply citing a rare occurrence in which (in principle) having such protection is a good safety net. It's not like this happens to me every day, or every month, or even every year for that matter. My PC has been pretty consistent with being virus-free and the last virus I had that actually had a visible effect was at least 5 years ago on a different computer.
ok, here's the thing, I fix computers for a living working at a large company whose name rhymes with Guess Why.
Some people like us, some people hate us, but a whole metric fuckload of people bring us broken computers and I fix them, and I know what works well, what works well but will fuck up your computer by deleting shit it shouldn't be, and what doesn't work at all.
These are listed in alphabetical order.
And if anyone wants to challenge my tech cred, I am more than willing to defend it.
Things that I've found to work and work well (rarely eat system files),
Kaspersky
NOD32 (I'm not allowed to use this at work)
Norton (any version >= 2008)
Panda (works-ish, but I've never seen it eat a system file)
Things that I've found to work and break shit while fixing things(mostly from a failed or not attempted disinfection of a vital system file, oh 0xc000021a, how I hate you so),
A-Squared
Webroot Spysweeper
Spyware Doctor
Things that I've found not to work:
Most everything else.
That being said. I don't run an anti-virus at home for the following reasons:
1) I mostly run an alternate operating system
2) When I do use windows, I don't do stupid shit. (99% of security is not opening the door to just anyone.)
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
I have Kaspersky, and I have been complaining about slowdowns for months, and experiencing them.
I can't play N64, GBA, DS, GCN, Wii, PSX, and Saturn games, or watch or make TASes of 'em without slowdowns (excluding encodes).
Having 2 or more instances of NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators slow it down too.
Something like 99.9% protection is not 100%, it's like having a window leaving a gap. Your house would be losing energy.
If you can't even watch GBA TASes without slowdown, it makes me think that you have a poor CPU over a problem with your antivirus program. What's your computer specs?
I pray that is sarcasm. That thing once auto-deleted my data structures homework, insisting it was a virus. Didn't even ask for confirmation.
That'll teach me to ever run a new laptop with full bloatware ever again.
It also doesn't let you whitelist anything, for example my CS 367 homework directory. Apperantly Ollydbg is (or was) malicious according to McAfee.
Raiscan wrote:
Viruses hide themselves in task manager. They can easily name their exe svchost.exe or something, and they don't all use excessive amounts of CPU.
Or just use DLL injection and skip the new process thing altogether, except for the second or so it takes to inject. Who's gonna notice iexplore.exe or firefox.exe taking up another meg of RAM?
As for what I use, Spybot S&D and Ad-aware. Every couple weeks I run a Hi-Jack This! scan.
adelikat wrote:
It started off fairly tame, but as more balls entered the picture it sure got a lot more entertaining.
It's a HP G60 Laptop
AMD Turion Dual-Core RM-75
2.2 GHz
3.00GB RAM
32-bit
Wow, with a dual-core processor and 3GB of RAM and you're having those kind of problems? Wow. Kaspersky is worse then I thought.
I would at least run a Disc Cleanup and Drive Defragmenter and see if that helps any. But still...geezus.
It also happened to me while I'm on FCEUX 2.1.4 while seeing the D-Pad Hero 2 TAS.
My screen can't go lower than 640x480.
The slowdown happened at window size 1024x720 (or 4x3)
I'm hoping that Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2011 doesn't hog the CPU like what the 2010 version did.
Dolphin runs real slow on my laptop, I still have my desktop, but the emulator won't load on my desktop.
I think it has to do with the memory, I could probably expand the memory on my desktop from 512MB to 1GB.
I won't be as silly as arflech, but buy as much RAM as you can afford. 32-bit Windows OSes can handle up to 3GB.
They can handle up to 4GB (2^32 B=2^2*2^30 B=4*1GB=4GB), it's just that some of that is reserved by the kernel for use by your hardware, so your OS will report less (my desktop with 4GB installed says 3.5GB, while my laptop with 2GB, which is the max. for its motherboard, says 1.96GB)
Well, Windows 7 on our work PCs reports what's installed as well as what's available (which was started in I believe Vista SP1), which states 4GB installed and 3GB available. My XP at home reports the 3GB too, even with 4GB installed. I know in my home computer case it's not an issue with video RAM, but I just chalked it up to 32-bit only allowing 3GB and that you needed 64-bit to see more. Meh.
This article is a pretty good read about RAM and OSes.
http://technicians-blog.kingcomputer.com.au/index.php/how-much-ram-can-i-access-with-a-32-bit-or-64-bit-operating-system/
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
The things I've seen, experienced or heard of when it comes to Windows security is amazing.... I am surprised that I am dumb enough to use Windows.
The most commonly used operating system in the world is as trustworthy as a 2.95 US dollar bill when it's right out of the box.
Before you can even dare to connect to the internet you must have updated everything... installed a good anti-virus and a registry guardian.
First: Norton and McAfee are probably 2 of the unsafest anti-virus programs on the planet. I've worked as a PC repair technician and some of my friends work at call centers for PC support. On several occasions we have all seen and heard about Norton finding itself as the virus Norton! McAfee is worse... if that is possible... I've never seen any PC this has happened to but some of my friends have gotten calls about McAfee removing their system files after update and their PCs wont boot... Probably a virus infection you think? Not every time... about 50/50 actually... 50% of the times this has happened there had been a false positive on a windows kernel file! McAfee have posted about this on their site/wiki every time it has happened saying they're sorry and telling you how to fix it... how can you trust an anti-virus that might remove system files due to false positives?
For an anti-virus I've had the least problems with AntiVir and NOD32. No anti-virus is perfect but these do a good enough job... but you cannot put your life in their hands, you need to use common sense as well. Never open shady links or attachments and so on...
When it comes to registry guardians there are surprisingly few... but they will be needed, anti-virus programs rarely guard you against malicious lines of code in a script, and reg-adds can be done too silent on any windows machine. A good registry guardian forces you to approve or deny every change that will be made to the registry, giving you complete control. So far I have not found one that forces this... but the best one I used is the TeaTimer that comes with Spybot S&D. No matter what browser you are using you should really use Spybot S&D, because the immunization function is one of the greatest innovation I ever encountered.
Now you are free to think of connecting the PC to the internet. And whatever you do... never browse the internet with Internet Explorer. The browser protects you against nothing. The security has been improved since version 6 but it is still really low compared to the others on the market like Opera and FireFox.
And never use Windows Firewall... it is not safe either... Several times it has completely disabled the network of PCs I've looked at... mostly for no reason... to unlock the network you need to kill the service and you cannot start it again or the lock will be back. I do not find software firewalls really necessary, if you have a brain and a hardware firewall, today these are almost always included in your router, you will probably never experience any problems.
So far I have not found one that forces this... but the best one I used is the TeaTimer that comes with Spybot S&D. No matter what browser you are using you should really use Spybot S&D, because the immunization function is one of the greatest innovation I ever encountered.
I ended up disabling TeaTimer because it hogged system resources and kept bothering me even about legitimate Registry changes...even as I was about to reboot because of a software update, giving me almost no time to confirm or deny.
However I do make sure to immunize on a regular basis (it's a bit outdated though, like it doesn't work with the new Opera urlfilter.ini location), and also to use SpywareBlaster, which only partially immunizes, and then only works on IE and browsers based on Firefox.
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
arflech wrote:
Warepire wrote:
So far I have not found one that forces this... but the best one I used is the TeaTimer that comes with Spybot S&D. No matter what browser you are using you should really use Spybot S&D, because the immunization function is one of the greatest innovation I ever encountered.
I ended up disabling TeaTimer because it hogged system resources and kept bothering me even about legitimate Registry changes...even as I was about to reboot because of a software update, giving me almost no time to confirm or deny.
However I do make sure to immunize on a regular basis (it's a bit outdated though, like it doesn't work with the new Opera urlfilter.ini location), and also to use SpywareBlaster, which only partially immunizes, and then only works on IE and browsers based on Firefox.
I agree that the TeaTimer is far from perfect but it is the best guardian I have found, if you know a better one I would love to know about it.
I have informed the Spybot team about the new location of urlfilter.ini, hopefully the next Spybot version will have fixed that.
BitDefender works best, but if you can't buy it, there's always Microsoft Security Essentials.
Games to TAS:
1. Rampart (NES)
2. Pokemon Yellow (GB)
3. Aladdin (SNES)
4. Shadowrun (SNES)
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<sonicsonic3> and please tell me...WHAT IS THE BACK LONG JUMP CODE!? [on SM64's BLJ]
*shrug* I've always found Nod32 and Outpost Security Suite best. They've won numerous awards. Not free, of course. For that there are good free alternatives.
