The Glade 4.0

I know there are some folks here who use (used?) AVG.

Apparently a recent update is breaking some Win7/Vista builds.

I haven't personally experienced this, but after reading about it this AM, I thought I'd share...

According to the articles, the problem is with a boot-time file (avg.sys), and even safe mode isn't usable. The only way to recover is to boot from glass and restore a previous restore point, or using a bootable USB image provided by AVG that removes the update for you.

Here are a couple of links....

http://www.dailytech.com/AVG+Update+Cri ... e20310.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/02 ... ne_update/

Yikes!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Avast > AVG.

(I used to base this solely on the name being far more appealling --and implying it was made by pirates, so there's no way it could fail-- but now maybe there is empirical evidence for it!)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Pffft... you didn't even spell it right..

It's "Avast!" matey :p

I use Norton 360 on my home computers, and McAfee (newest build) on my work computers.

No problems with either so far, and I'm thankful at times like this.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

McAfee is the worst program ever.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I dislike it greatly compared to N360.... But it's a work computer, and I have little choice in the matter.

I back up frequently.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I don't use any antivirus on my personal machines, and have never had an infection, with the exception of the infected Razr keyboard drivers I downloaded from Razr's own site.

I did have my Sister install AVG Free after having to spend too many Saturday afternoons disinfecting her machines. It's been pretty effective up to now, but this may lead me to look for an alternative product.

I refuse to use Norton or Mcafee on any system where I have any say-so. My company uses 'Symantec Endpoint Protection' on their default images, but fortunately, I'm not obligated to use those builds most of the time.

I had no antivirus for around 6 years with no problem... And then suddenly got a nasty rootkit from I don't know where... Knocked my system down for almost 2 months.

I've been pretty pleased with Norton 360- and since I've had it, it's saved me several times from a really nasty virus that's circulating the department via USB drives in non-internet accessible instrument computers.

It's very lightweight (unlike previous generations), and the backup utility is actually useful.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Been using Avira AntiVir for probably half a year now.

I ran the NephyrS system previously without any protection and honestly did pretty well. My niece proved to be the weak link in my security chain. I got one of those dumb "omg you have 390,000 viruses buy our software fast!" malware things as a result. Didn't really do much that I could see, but it was enough to at least try out some free antivirus stuff.

Not sure I'm really too happy with it. I can never find information on anything it claims to detect... and its detections are always on things I've had for awhile that came from reputable sources... definitely smells like false positives to me. I do believe all the warnings I get are from the heuristics portion, too.

The somewhat ironic portion to this all... is that I swear I have some sort of malware on my computer for the past few months now. Every so often, maybe once or twice a week, I'll get a Google search result redirected to some ad website. They've all seemed harmless so far, but it's totally mindboggling. It happens so rarely that for a bit there I thought I was just seeing things.

Fully updated Avira, Spybot, and MalwareBytes don't pick anything up though. I dunno. :p

I've never used any virus software on my personal computer.

Mac FTW!

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In time, this too shall pass.

Not really. They can't put the exclamation mark in their web address, and until i type www.avast!.com and have it work, they're just avast.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yes, because nobody rights software for the Mac. Including viruses.

Note that it's proven that OSX and Linux are both normally less secure than Windows 7, except nobody bothers attacking them because there's no useful reason to do so.


You obviously buy your software on disks and get it all from official sources. This has its drawbacks, but I wouldn't do otherwise without antivirus.

As for the varying effectiveness and buggyness/intrusiveness of AV apps, with antivirus, you get the opposite of what you pay for.

Windows Security Essentials > Avast! free > AvG free > Avast! Pro > AvG Internet Security > Avast Internet Security > AvG Internet Security Business Editon > Anything by Symantec > Anything by McAfee.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yes, writing DDoS bots for Mac and Linux would pretty much be a ginormous waste of time.

And writing a virus to annoy the 149 people that use Mac's and the 87 that use Linux desktops wouldn't exactly be time well spent either :p

Guess it's time to try that free copy of Kaspersky..

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

You just keep telling yourself whatever you need to feel good about the lipstick smeared pig of an OS you run...

...and I'll just keep running without virus problems.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Weird, I don't have virus problems on Windows, either...

Whats the ratio of Windows virus' in the wild vs. OS X?

Oh, wait, you can't divide by 0... my bad!

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In time, this too shall pass.

Amusingly enough, I've been seeing stuff on security blogs about rising interest in Apple-targetted stuff.

I run Avira Antivir Free, and have been quite pleased with it. It's unobtrusive (aside from it's daily nagware popup), performs well, and has alerted me on a couple websites -- usually stuff I've been able to trace back to Flash ads. I've been so happy with the product that when I upgrade my OS, I'll probably throw money at them for the paid version.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

It would be disastrous to apple users, if they could figure out how to spread it, because most of them, like Taskiss, assume their computers are safe.

The problem with attempting to spread it is a virus has a hard time seeking out apple users, finding OSX on the Internet is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Mac OSX hides essentially by not existing.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I don't run anti-virus software regularly either. If I suspect I may be gotten infected, I'll download one of the various free AV tools and get rid of it. And I'll periodically run Ad Aware to strip off tracking cookies.

My home machine is behind a hardware firewall and I'm fairly careful about where I surf, and I know what things not to click on or open in my email.

It's a fair enough point that the relative obscurity of Linux works in its favor in this respect. Although, this ignores the entirety of the server and embedded market, in which Linux is far from obscure.

But as to the rest, these kinds of statement are largely unprovable in both directions. It depends wildly on how you quantify "secure". And with respect to "Linux" it's not even a monolithic entity in the first place, so what exactly are you even comparing? Just the kernel? Common distributions (if so, which ones)? I mean, if you're installing Damn Vulnerable Linux, then sure -- I'll make the unqualified assertion that DVL is less secure than Windows.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I find that an interesting perspective...

If the entire personal computing base were compared to, say, the population of North America, OS X compares more favorably in it's share than Canada does in it's.

And you say it virtually doesn't exist. Most curious.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I feel like computer market shares are always going to be skewed due to the corporate side. Personal Apple computer sales have jumped so dramatically, if I had to guess, I'd say 30%+ of personal users are in OSX now.

Most servers are in corporate datacenters behind firewalls, and are not used routinely for surfing the web or installing questionable user apps, drivers, etc...

The risk profile of a server (for exposure to a virus) is considerably lower than a desktop of any kind on a home network.