Learn how to protect yourself against viruses and malware

[Nguyen Trung Hoa]

Special thanks to Enzo for the editing and suggestions and also to Lora for making this post look better with her PS skill.


This question is asked every day not only in helpdesk but in each and every section of this forum. Yes I know that if members searched they would find what they wanted but I don't blame them cause we all want to keep our pc secure.
To start I want to say that THERE IS NO PERFECT ANTIVIRUS, INTERNET SECURITY, FIREWALL OR WHAT EVER THAT CAN KEEP YOU SAFE EXCEPT IF YOU UNPLUG THE PC FOR EVER.
In this post I will try to give you some stats about antivirus and generally protection that may help you if you give a small reading. Let's start!!!


Think and read comments before you download something. It will save you from many troubles


There are many antivirus and as every thing is this planet there are some that are good and some that are useless.

And here the most important test. The on demand proactive tests for new Virus/Malware (in a few words they try how good are the antiviruses with unknown threats)




The below table shows the proactive on-demand detection capabilities of the various products, sorted by detection rate. The given awards are based not only on the detection rates over the new malware, but also considering the false alarm rates.



A simple list of detection rates, from research by av-comparatives.org February 2009
Out of a total of 1.274.928 viruses, trojans, worms and malware the following list tells us the detection rates of the different AntiVirus programs:

Code:

http://static.img4tw.com/i/185d9a57.png

Code:

http://static.img4tw.com/i/e7e07e03.png

Code:

http://static.img4tw.com/i/435716ca.png

Code:

http://static.img4tw.com/i/e7e07e03.png

Code:

http://static.img4tw.com/i/e4212e5f.png

And now some details on the throughput rate in MB/sec(higher= faster) in highest setting and on demand scan. Basically we have here how fast each antivirus scan




So out of this charts you can see how protected you are using a specific antivirus, how fast does it scan and how many false positives you may expect.




If you think that an antivirus is the only important safety measure....
YOU ARE MISTAKEN
An antivirus will stop the virus when it reaches your pc but a firewall will stop it before coming at your system.
Ask yourself this. Would you rather put a lock the door at your house to prevent the robbers or wait them inside and kill them with a gun.
Yes I know it's more exciting waiting to kill them but remember how hard it's to clean the blood out of the rug.

We have a few of them here and even more on the chart that are really good so take a look

Online Armor
Comodo firewall
Outpost Firewall Pro







Even though you have installed antivirus and firewall you are not completely free from threats like adware, malware, spyware. So we will need this little geniuses here to help us from malware (though the extent of damage is less they can be very annoying )and in this category the more the best. Install many of them and do an on demand scan from time to time to make sure that you are safe.
By the way most of them have free version which can do the on demand scan .(One important thing is you don't need these applications to run daily, you can use them to scan once in a week or so and completely close them and save your system resources).


SuperAntispyware
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
Ad-Aware
Trojan Remover
Sophos Anti-Rootkit
Spybot Search and Destroy
Spy Sweeper
Spyware Doctor
Stopzilla
SpywareBlaster
...etc



No need to tell you about this because Mighty_Marvel has already made a great tutorial that you can find here.

Code:

http://www.warez-bb.org/viewtopic.php?t=3362725&highlight=

Again done by Mighty_Marvel
See here

Code:

http://www.warez-bb.org/viewtopic.php?t=3050812#3050812

Yes sometimes even if you do anything suggested here and even more there will be a time that you will be careless or the download may seem clean and you get infected.
No need to worry. Just use all the above to remove them and if they don't you may try an online antivirus scanner. Here are links of some online scanners.

Code:

http://www.bitdefender.co.uk/site/VirusInfo

Code:

http://www.kaspersky.com/service?chapter=161739400

Code:

http://www.eset.eu/eset-online-scanner

Code:

http://home.mcafee.com/Downloads/FreeScan.aspx

Code:

http://www.f-secure.com/en_EMEA/security/security-lab/tools-and-services/online-scanner/index.html

Code:

http://cainternetsecurity.net/entscanner/

or in more extreme circumstances some rescue disks.

Code:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Kaspersky-Rescue-Disk.shtml

Code:

http://download.bitdefender.com/rescue_cd/

Code:

http://www.avira.com/en/support/support_downloads.html

Code:

http://www.f-secure.com/linux-weblog/2008/06/19/f-secure-rescue-cd-300-released/

THERE IS NO PERFECT ANTIVIRUS, INTERNET SECURITY, FIREWALL OR WHAT EVER THAT CAN KEEP YOU SAFE EXCEPT IF YOU UNPLUG THE PC FOR EVER.

BitDefender Internet Security
or
Kaspersky Internet Security
or
GData
And for those who want freeware and also the BEST Avira antivir + comodo firewall + superantispyware


Have a good day and keep downloading warez!!!!!!

















[06/11/2010]Updated with new antivirus and firewall test
[03/20/2010]Updated with new antivirus test
[01/20/2010]Fixed a typo that master131 pointed
[01/12/2010]Updated a chart with results of all test
[12/13/2009]Updated with latest firewall results
[12/1/2009]Updated with latest antivirus test
[10/11/2009] Updated with latest firewall results
[10/06/2009 Updated with latest antivirus test
[9/27/2009] Added more AV test
[9/26/2009] Originally Posted