I have removed thousands upon thousands of viruses from pc’s. Some antivirus vendors did a fair job (if you count the number of viruses they let slip by) and some did a terrible job. So which ones work and which ones don’t? Well time for the brutally honest truth.
You are the worst thing that happened to your computer and your antivirus can’t protect you.
Ok personal rant over. What I mean by that is that none of the programs I have ever reviewed or cleaned up behind prevented a virus infection completely. The reason for that is that virus writers got smart. They realized that ,to a point, anti-virus companies had gotten slightly ahead of the curve and had started down a road that would stop them (with heuristics).
That’s when they targeted you.
Now they have targeted code that does a couple of things. The first thing they do with their new code is use a nifty little feature in windows management console to shutdown your real time antivirus (and sometimes the scheduler). Then they pick on your networking method of choice. If they spread via IM they attack your contacts in your messaging program, if it’s a social website then your profile starts sending out messages to people.
There are a few good anti viruses out there and people have sworn by this one or that one. I won’t go into great detail about which one is better because that will change by version and even sometimes by definition number. Currently the top preventative anti-virus is Pand Cloud, but that is very likely to change even before this writing is finished.
So how do you keep them off your machine for free?
Learn where they are attacking from. Your browser is their target. IE (Internet Explorer) is probably the worst offender when it comes to infections. It is still the market leader and while it has gotten a lot better with version 8. People’s behavior kills any plugs that Micro Soft tries to put in place. Almost every “free” program out there wants to install a toolbar or browser add-on and I’ve seen people with 10 -15 toolbars on their browser. It looks crazy when their web content is only like 3 inches tall because of toolbars.
Mozilla Firefox is the second biggest target. But Firefox is also the shining star when it comes to security. Through one addon (Noscript) you can completely block ALL these new nasty viruses. Including anything new that comes out. As long as you play by the rules.
Chrome and Safari are third on the list of targets due to familiarity and market share. I don’t like them because they don’t allow much user control over security and they don’t have any extensions that can be added (which can be a plus).
So there you have it the best and the worst. There even more options out there like Flock and Opera, but I’ll go into them next time.