Originally Posted by star_world (Post 14530255)

I am completely opposed to using any program that requires itself to be continually running in the background for AV / security. I haven't run any in at least 5 years and have never once found anything even remotely suspicious on any Windows PC I run. I do one-off scans every few months as a precaution but I've yet to come across anything to be concerned about.

The number one priority has got to be to stop running IE. With a modern OS (eg: Win7) plus a modern browser such as Firefox, you really have to go out of your way to let any sort of spyware get onto a PC. A few generations back (XP / IE7 / FF2) I'd only recommend this approach for people who were very aware of what they were doing, but these days I think the situation is somewhat different.

The performance drain caused by any of these "active" scanners is still simply too great, even on a relatively high-performance machine, IMHO.

Originally Posted by cordelli (Post 14531135)

To me that's like saying you will only put your seatbelt on when you get into an accident, there's no need for it the rest of the time as you have gone years without needing it.

In the case of virus and malware, it's way better to deal with it before it gets to your machine, than it is to try to fix it later. I'm all for prevention instead of cure in this case.

Originally Posted by star_world (Post 14531052)

I don't get your point - I certainly don't have a collection of "nasty stuff" on the hard drive.

Originally Posted by cordelli (Post 14531135)

To me that's like saying you will only put your seatbelt on when you get into an accident, there's no need for it the rest of the time as you have gone years without needing it.

In the case of virus and malware, it's way better to deal with it before it gets to your machine, than it is to try to fix it later. I'm all for prevention instead of cure in this case.

Originally Posted by cordelli (Post 14531135)

To me that's like saying you will only put your seatbelt on when you get into an accident, there's no need for it the rest of the time as you have gone years without needing it.

In the case of virus and malware, it's way better to deal with it before it gets to your machine, than it is to try to fix it later. I'm all for prevention instead of cure in this case.

Originally Posted by deubster (Post 14531203)

I'm glad MSE looks at both and seems to take little or no toll on performance. But I'm not yet certain how good it is

Originally Posted by raistlin (Post 14531186)

How do you know, exactly ? Unless you are running a weird operating system where most malware cannot work (say, a customized version of QNX), possibly on customized hardware as well, or unless you never put any media on your machine and never, ever connected it to the Internet, there's no way on Earth you can know your machine is NOT infected.

You can know your machine is not BLATANTLY infected by COMMON malware. Which is a completely different thing than being sure you are not infected at all :)

You would be surprised at how some things out there are nasty, stealthy and quite good at tricking people into infecting themselve.

Originally Posted by star_world (Post 14531959)

I've made the determination that scanning every month or two and confirming what I already believe to be true (i.e. no malware exists on the PC) is sufficient

Originally Posted by raistlin (Post 14532372)

False. Witness the aurora incident:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blog...-0-day-exploit

Those were all up-to-date pcs, running corporate antiviruses, behind a firewall and NAT.

Some of those were on state-of-the-art corporate networks (e.g., Google).

You are working under severely misguided assumptions. In today's corporate world, zero-day drive-by downloads are common and scary.

This is what I study for a living ;-)

Originally Posted by raistlin (Post 14532372)

You're obviously free to make your own risk assessments, but you seem to be working on some seriously wrong assumptions:



False. Witness the aurora incident:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blog...-0-day-exploit

Those were all up-to-date pcs, running corporate antiviruses, behind a firewall and NAT.

Some of those were on state-of-the-art corporate networks (e.g., Google).

You are working under severely misguided assumptions. In today's corporate world, zero-day drive-by downloads are common and scary.

This is what I study for a living ;-)

Originally Posted by cblaisd (Post 14532730)

Didn't realize this would provoke such a colloquy ;)

Originally Posted by ScottC (Post 14532744)

The only thing missing is someone telling you to "buy a Mac" :D

Originally Posted by star_world (Post 14532649)

We could debate this all day, but the fact is that for the type of event you mention above, you have virtually the same issue regardless of what security software you are running (or not).