Author Topic: free antivirus comparisons  (Read 21308 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Lightages

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 4313
  • Country: ca
  • Canadian po
Re: free antivirus comparisons
« Reply #50 on: June 11, 2012, 07:19:16 am »
Hmmm. I haven't looked at the AV tests for a while and it seems that MSE has fallen quite a bit. Time for me to go Avira again
 

Offline AntiProtonBoy

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 988
  • Country: au
  • I think I passed the Voight-Kampff test.
Re: free antivirus comparisons
« Reply #51 on: June 11, 2012, 07:21:07 am »
I use paid antivirus at the moment, but having used MSE before, I will never use it again. It has awful detection rates according to tests ran by AV testers and personal experience seems to confirm this. http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_fd_mar2012_intl_en.pdf
Even if MSE happens to be "worst" performer in those tests, I'd hardly call 93.1% detection rate out of 300,000 samples awful. I'd be interested to know what kind of malware MSE has actually missed, whether they actually posed a real threat to the user. Because things like cookie files, registry values, etc are quite benign - something which other anti-virus programs make a huge fuss out of, only to alarm users and spook them to keep paying for a license. Also, Zero false positive triggers in MSE is not something to be scoffed at.
 

Offline PeterG

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 830
  • Country: au
Re: free antivirus comparisons
« Reply #52 on: June 11, 2012, 08:10:23 am »
Even if MSE happens to be "worst" performer in those tests, I'd hardly call 93.1% detection rate out of 300,000 samples awful. I'd be interested to know what kind of malware MSE has actually missed, whether they actually posed a real threat to the user. Because things like cookie files, registry values, etc are quite benign - something which other anti-virus programs make a huge fuss out of, only to alarm users and spook them to keep paying for a license. Also, Zero false positive triggers in MSE is not something to be scoffed at.

Agreed.
I also tend to question the results of these reviews. There are, in general, inconsistencies in the results when you compare several sets of results from different sources. This leads me to think its a matter of who has the most up to date database on test day.

Regards
Testing one two three...
 

Offline touchh

  • Contributor
  • Posts: 25
  • Country: us
Re: free antivirus comparisons
« Reply #53 on: June 11, 2012, 08:45:15 am »
I use paid antivirus at the moment, but having used MSE before, I will never use it again. It has awful detection rates according to tests ran by AV testers and personal experience seems to confirm this. http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_fd_mar2012_intl_en.pdf
Even if MSE happens to be "worst" performer in those tests, I'd hardly call 93.1% detection rate out of 300,000 samples awful. I'd be interested to know what kind of malware MSE has actually missed, whether they actually posed a real threat to the user. Because things like cookie files, registry values, etc are quite benign - something which other anti-virus programs make a huge fuss out of, only to alarm users and spook them to keep paying for a license. Also, Zero false positive triggers in MSE is not something to be scoffed at.
It still missed 21,000 viruses, yes it had no FP's but the others that scored higher than MSE missed something like 4,000 with 2FPs. I'd say the tradeoff is worth it.

Now, as to what I've seen personally on MSE - Personally, an advertisement on a website used a PDF exploit to give me that "MS Antivirus 2010" virus. It killed MSE and infected my computer with ease. I could have easily prevented this by keeping Adobe up to date and disabling the PDF embedding - but I was careless. That being said, what really made me switch A/V was the fact that almost *all* other antiviruses caught (as scanned by virustotal.com) the file that infected me as malware and a few of the computers I had repaired had been infected with similar viruses (they were also running MSE).

I think with the right security procedures MSE would be fine. It just seems like they suck at updating their database with new threats.

 

Offline Monkeh

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7990
  • Country: gb
Re: free antivirus comparisons
« Reply #54 on: June 11, 2012, 08:47:26 am »
i dare you to find fault with my solution ( in terms of security )

The blind assumption that because you pay for a product, it must do everything it claims.

no. my solution was free : simply power off the computer. doesn't cost you anything and consumes no power. you didnt even have to install anything.

I thought you meant your other solution. As for your suggestion of turning the computer off, it's not even worthy of a response.
« Last Edit: June 11, 2012, 10:23:56 am by Monkeh »
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf