Most Users Think They Have AntiVirus Protection, While Only Half Do

SkiifGeek writes "A survey carried out by McAfee and the NCSA found that while more than 90% of users believed that they were protected by antivirus or antimalware products that were updated at least once a week, only 51% actually were. 'Even with significantly growing awareness by everyday users of the need for efficient and effective antivirus / antimalware software, and the increasing market penetration achieved by the security industry, the nature of rapidly evolving Information Security threats means that the baseline of protection is outstripping the ability of users to keep up (without some form of extra help).' The study is available online in PDF format. What sort of an effect does this sort of thinking, and practice, have on the overall security of your systems, networks, and efforts to educate?"

Re:Windows AV Programs

[Urd.Yggdrasil]

I recommend AVG Free: http://free.grisoft.com/doc/download-free-anti-virus/us/frt/0 [grisoft.com]
It isn't as good as some paid AV software, but as long as you aren't going to russian crack sites it should be all you need.

ClamWin

[Rob Simpson]

It's free and open-source, [clamwin.com] but doesn't have an on-access scanner. AVG and Avast are commercial, but have free versions.

Re:Does anyone need anti-virus software?

[Dunbal]

Perhaps I'm just isolated from the sort of users who are so stupid as to get viruses on their PCs...but are there any left?

      Teenagers. My 14 year old infected her computer the other day when she received a copy of a IM worm that disguised itself as a .zip file and said "here are my new pics". Since the message was from one of her friends, obviously she opened it. Now she has learned to be careful, but there's always someone around the house who will screw up.

Re:I used to run a small computer repair business.

[Nimey]

Viruses != worms != trojans. In my experience you need not only an antivirus program (I prefer AVG Free) but also a selection of anti-spyware programs, since trojans often conceal spyware, and anti-virus programs aren't focused on spyware.

I use Spybot S&D (immunize and don't install teatimer, it's annoying (unless you've got an infection, then use it to help contain it and remove it after you're done) and sometimes Windows Defender on those machines which need periodic scanning w/o user intervention. I don't care for Ad-aware 2007 (1.06 was much better). Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (http://www.ubcd4win.com/) is very useful for cleaning up infections, and for many other uses.

It also helps to only let users have Admin rights if there's a need -- unless they run crappy Adobe s/w that requires Admin to *run* or if they're secretary to someone high up in the org (yay politics) or they actually know what they're doing, have them run as limited user. Come by and install s/w if they need something new added.

Re:McAfee

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

A study carried out by McAfee and North Carolina School of the Arts says users need to buy more virus scanners. I'd have been amazed if a McAfee study had reached another conclusion.

Re:How can that be?

[Anonymous Coward]

I, like another commenter, think it's because of OEM's so often shipping AV trials that expire and they misunderstanding and think "having antivirus included" meant having it all along. Users would probably be less confused if OEM's didn't include any antivirus at all, or offered a lifetime subscription for some extra cost.

One of my son's fellow co-workers wanted him to look at their computer to see why it wasn't connecting to the internet via the browser. When he got to checking he found a problem he has seen repeatedly, Norton was expired, but still on and blocking access from just about everything to the internet. So he shuts it down and heads to the Norton web site to snag their uninstaller [symantec.com] being as the included one doesn't work very well. Once Norton was uninstalled he downloaded and installed AVG [grisoft.com] for them.

This ticked him off more at Symantec then he already was, especially on seeing yet again the number the number of different special removal tools for the various versions of Norton Security software there was. The Uninstalls shipped with the software should work, but they do an extremely poor job of it and sometimes crash and lock out the systems. Norton needs to be dealt with before a system restore [symantec.com] too, else it will cause it to fail. Not the only AV with this problem of course, but extra aggravating cause of the requirement for the seperate utility to actually clean it off the system. Not to mention that pre-Win95 most of the Norton products were fairly decent, one of my favorites was Norton Desktop which made Win 3.1 more controllable, but with the advent of Win95 on Norton products always seem to be broken. None to the extent that 95 and larger hard drives blew old Norton Utilities 8 away, wouldn't let Norton Desktop even exist for obvious reasons and Norton 95 was just a broken product from its beginning, IMO. After all this time its still a memory hog that doesn't play well with others but then Windows doesn't always play well with others either and some have credited Norton Desktop on Win3.1 as having added extra push to Microsoft radically changing the GUI.

Antivirus software, and *good* antivirus software

[david.given]

I recently had to fix my parents' machine, because it got massively infected. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I ended up flattening it and reinstalling XP from Microsoft's disks rather than the crappy OEM version that was preinstalled on it, but that's another story.

My father had a subscription to Norton. So, why didn't Norton protect him against the virus? Well, a quick install and run of AVG later, I figured out why: Norton had been lobotomised by the virus. Half of its files were corrupted beyond repair. Most of the Javascript that its crappy UI was written in had been replaced by binaries. It was like one of those caterpillars whose brain gets eaten by wasp larvae, and the caterpillar never notices. It was horrific.

Unfortunately I still can't persuade him that AVG (which is free, which gets good reviews, which actually seems to work, and which doesn't keep popping up crap in your face) might be a better choice on the new system; but hopefully the new improved installation will protect him. We'll see.

Re:PARENT IS DEAD ON!!!

[gardyloo]

Unfortunately, none of the free ones are more then marginally useful in unattended installations; you have to click on stuff to get the new version, which my grandmother won't do. It's just as stupid as the pandemic itself.

Not sure if you mean that you have to click on stuff to get the entirely new antivirus engine, or just the definitions. If it's the latter, Avast! is a free one which updates automatically, at least once a day. No clicky, no worries. You can even remove the notifications that it's been updated, if grandma can't handle those.

Re:How can that be?

[DavidTC]

It is perhaps worth pointing out that no antivirus could every be uninstalled without an uninstaller, not even ones on a Mac, as, duh, antivirus hook into various operating system functions. Antiviruses are not applications, they are system utilities.

That said, it's only Norton that is consistently broken during uninstall.