What Anti-Virus do you use?

For the purposes of this discussion (that is to say not defining something for a dictionary) I thought we stopped making that distinction about 5 years ago if not longer?

 

add NOD32
i use both NOD32 and Kaspersky

 

... so there isn't a difference? If so what is it?

 

NOD32 here. I can't vote.

 

ESET (NOD32 with firewall and such).

one of the best in my honest opinion. as it is very light and has never failed me.

 

On my old xp desktop I have avast 4.8, it can't use the 6.0 for some reason. On my laptop I use avast 6.0 and avg 2010.

 

Traditionally you had viruses which were unwanted programs that spread by themselves (various methods from abusing autoplay to actual exploits) and trojans which were unwanted programs that you needed to run yourself (no self propagation).

Along the way spyware (website monitors, application usage monitoring....) and other malware (ad bars, dialers and what have you) appeared/grew in number and were equally troublesome to end users.

I will also mention firewalls (network connection and network application/protocol monitoring) and backup as it might become important in a moment.

For the longest time and in some cases it still happens the anti virus makers ignored the second category and focused solely on viruses and trojans with maybe a bit of heuristics (automated detection) and protection (something tries to change some important settings and it says oi) in general. Also they tried to clean things up if you managed to get infected although in many ways these were simpler times. This meant people needed multiple programs to detect viruses and trojans, others to detect spyware/malware and others for firewalls and backup.

Because of this omission the AV companies were getting laughed at by security professionals for incompetence/being money grabbing parasites (although they still are being laughed at now but for slightly different reasons- http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5167328 sums it up in the last few minutes pretty well but if you can watch the whole thing) so they eventually added the second category as well as maybe grew a firewall and backup abilities although the latter two are a different conversation. Along the way some of the malware scanners added some virus detection if they did not already have it (viruses and trojans are still malware) and maybe heuristics (however many are still tools you run to detect and clean up things rather than programs you have running all the time though although this gets blurred again when you have the standalone scanning options of some of these programs than can be triggered upon downloading a new file/email). They might have tried to call themselves something different as well "internet security", "security suite", "security solution"... but the term antivirus is fairly engrained so it lost some of the original meaning.

This blurred the lines and meant people might not have needed multiple scanners any more. At the same time the way malware worked changed dramatically as well with virus kits becoming standard, polymorphic code and related concepts/concepts with similar effects becoming fairly standard, traditional signature detection becoming far harder thanks to the efforts of malware writers, differences in intentions- 90's malware might have just popped up a screen saying you got yourself infected or simply tried to mess your machine up where now it will try to stay cloaked (and keep your machine infected) and use your machine as a zombie to do whatever and more. This is also what gave many anti virus programs a serious, if not terminal, case of the bloat and related to the previous lines in this paragraph reduced their effectiveness to the point where people say AV programs are but part of the solution to the security problem.

 

i use avast! and malwarebyte's anti malware

 

Ooookay. Thanks for that.

 

I used all of the software's listed in the poll
Currently using Avast Pro Internet Security!

 

I use Avira for Virus and MalwareByte Anti Malware (MBAM) (Bought it) for malware detection
On my other PC i use AVAST in combination with MBAM

 

Currently using Avira. But it is doing no much help.

 

I'm using Kaspersky.

 

panda cloud on PC
and
bitdefender on laptop.

 

Ow, Right i also recently started messing around with ClamWin in Combination with Clam Sentinel (for real time scanning)
Light, fast and relative good, no annoying pop-ups (like avira and AVG free) and complete free

Maybe add ClamWin anti Virus also to the choice
Just like Microsoft Security Essentials

 

Wheres the "I don't use one" option?

I disable/choose not to use any anti-virus software because I don't get viruses. All anti-virus software do is stop something you're too ignorant to stop yourself. I don't download suspicious torrents, open scheme attachments, and when I go to a site with popups despite having Adblocker active, I force close that window to prevent any chance of unwanted downloads. I've been doing these things for over half a decade and I've been virus free for over half a decade.

I see no point in installing something that does what I already know instinctively what to do.

Though if I had to recommend one for someone, I'd say Avast as it gets alot of praise.

 

I have Bitdefender total 2010 on my laptop.

 

Then it has to be something on your end of things such as improper configuration, because Avira has been the best Antivirus solution for quite some time now. Even better than NOD32.

And I have no idea why ANYone would use AVG. It's one of the absolute worst out there. People should be doing their raeserch before blindly choosing an antivirus based upon the comments of others. Don't take my word for Avira... look into it on your own.

 

Used KIS 2010 last year.
My dad is so genius that he renewed it so instead of using KIS 2011, I'm using it once again. Fuck

I think Rydian would have to disagree with you.

 

Done properly I can stand behind no AV on windows but it takes some effort and makes life a bit more difficult (anybody that has had to train up noscript knows exactly what goes). Equally I rest easier if there is at least something like the clamav stuff that might not have heuristics but will at least be told to scan downloaded files and emails.

This being said it is not always your fault (be it ignorance or carelessness the end result is more or less the same)- newer languages and better compilers of older ones are reducing the amount of simple exploits that appear but they do appear none the less. These exploits can then get used to infect your machine and although I do not trust conventional heuristics all that much they do handle things. You might not download suspicious torrents but you might come across adverts (frequently put there by third parties under no control of the host site) and images in sites which have a history of such things.