The Cynic Says……

Personally, I avoid the “big name” antivirus programs simply because they tend to be overly bloated and just don’t work as well as people want to believe. I’ve been using Kaspersky Antivirus for about a year now and have yet to be infected with any sort of malware or virus in the time I’ve been using it. A couple of the A/V tests I’ve seen have generally put it at the top of the list for detection rate (generally 90% or better compared to 70-80% for Norton, McAfee and others) and this article confirms that further.  Admittedly, most any robust antivirus solution is going to cause somewhat of an increase in boot time simply because it’s yet another program to load, but if the antivirus solution is going to keep me from getting all kinds of nasty malware on my computer then it’s worth it. So what if it adds 30 seconds of boot time to your PC. Go get something to drink or use the bathroom in the meantime. No big deal to me. It’s not quite as bloated as Norton or McAfee, but it’s still a bit more bloated than some of the smaller A/V programs like AntiVir, NOD32, Sophos, etc. However, on the upside they do issue virus definition updates every few hours, which means less time between the time a virus is introduced into the wild and when the program can detect and clean it. Take a look at the Slammer worm for a good reason as to why timely virus updates are of paramount importance. Here’s a quote from an article I found:

During
the first three minutes of the worm’s spread, the number of infected
machines doubled roughly every 8.5 seconds, the study found. This is
more than 250 times faster than Code Red, which hit in mid-2001 and had
a doubling time of 37 minutes, according to the report. The worm hit
its full scanning rate of around 55 million scans per second at around
three minutes after the attack began at roughly 05:30 GMT on Saturday.

The result of this fast spread was that within ten minutes of the start of the attack the majority of the estimated 75,000
machines that were hit had been infected, said the report.

The article is from back in 2003, so references to any dates are going to be incorrect but it’s still a staggering statistic. 75,000 machines in 10 minutes? That’s a shitload! Sobig.F and Mydoom spread even faster. Who knows what the next “big one” is going to be like. Keep your antivirus up to date! I can’t count how many people’s computers I’ve fixed or been on in general whose virus definitions were sorely out of date (more than a week old). Heck, if it weren’t for automatic virus updates, I’d forget to update mine. A good antivirus program and up-to-date definitions could seriously prevent you from losing a whole lot of data and having to re-format your hard drive and re-install everything.

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