Your favourite Antivirus?

[Si Veteran]

Please use this thread as a reference for this topic, as time goes on and availabilty changes, the poll will be updated.

[Oborochan]

other: CA EZAV

only one guy mentioned it

it's a real shame

speaking of low resources, no one can beat this baby!

and i've never encoutred any virus or trojan since i have it

it get my vote!

i recommend everyone to try it

it's not free but it's worth it!

[Farstrider]

NOD32 wouldn't be slow unless you've got something else that it's not compatible with. It does seem to disagree with almost as many programs as Outpost though.

585967173[/snapback]

This is the problem that I have found with NOD32. I am still with McAfee ater all these years. NAV has gone to the dogs!!!

[Zxian]

I've been running NOD32 on my laptop for over a year now. Rock solid and low on resources. I've managed to convert many of my friends over after they've seen how fast everything is ready after a reboot (compared with the 30 second wait of Norton...). They've never had any problems that I've heard of either.

Slowest scanner? NOD32 is known for its fast scanning... my 80GB drive now takes 6 minutes to scan (and it's almost a full 80GB...) compared to the 45mins when I was running NAV2004.

EDIT: Oh and as for services, NOD32 only needs one process to keep your system safe: nod32krn.exe (the NOD32 Kernel Service). The other process (nod32kui.exe) is the GUI for NOD32, which isn't necessary if you've configured things properly.

Edited May 25, 2005 by Zxian

[BigDaddy]

using avast! here.. prettly lite on resources too i must say..

[Cyrilix]

I've been running NOD32 on my laptop for over a year now. Rock solid and low on resources. I've managed to convert many of my friends over after they've seen how fast everything is ready after a reboot (compared with the 30 second wait of Norton...). They've never had any problems that I've heard of either.

Slowest scanner? NOD32 is known for its fast scanning... my 80GB drive now takes 6 minutes to scan (and it's almost a full 80GB...) compared to the 45mins when I was running NAV2004.

EDIT: Oh and as for services, NOD32 only needs one process to keep your system safe: nod32krn.exe (the NOD32 Kernel Service). The other process (nod32kui.exe) is the GUI for NOD32, which isn't necessary if you've configured things properly.

585968461[/snapback]

What do you configure to turn that off?

And yes, for me, it's another vote for NOD32...used to use SAV, slow scanning, updates less frequent, and pretty decent on system resources but not as good as NOD32.

[faraway.]

Zone Alarm Security Suite 2005 :)

[Igorka]

I also use Nod32 :blush:

[Martyn]

Norton Antivirus 2005 for me, does the job and I dont like Nod32.

[Lan88]

im not really that fussy over what antivirus to use, but i had a very bad experience once when using Norton...so from then on i used AVG Free... works like a charm! (Y)

[weilik]

Symantec Antivirus v10 :cool:

[bathead]

Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition

its not bad

[Glorious]

Norton was terrible on my laptop and old PC. I use AVG, for the performance I get from it. My PC always loads quickly with even 14 icons in the taskbar it runs smoothly. It scans my 250GB hard-drive (of which there is now 199GB of free space) super quickly and its useful to just right click a file I have downloaded and scan it effectivley with AVG. :D

[bathead]

double post :D

[neoufo51]

Mks_vir. Best antivirus. Yes, better than nod32.

[B3AN]

It has to be NOD32. Rock solid and low resources. New version even supports malware.

[+Tantawi Subscriber²]

NOD32.

[NoneAvail]

i don't use anti virus

[sjakalen]

Symantec here. It's does the job and it doesn't bug me nor the system.

[AlexCosta]

Excuse me... but Avast is THE best!

Symantec crap will destroy your machine.

Never used NOD, so can?t really say much...

Anyway, I have been using Avast for years, it?s great!

:huh:h:

[AOXOMOXOA]

i may have already posted in this thread. there are so many.. oh well.

AVG

[Nexus]

http://www.zone365.com/content/10/96/2

Testbed consisted of 321 Viruses, Trojans and Worms, all for the Windows32 environment, and all reasonably new samples. I don't have any data on whether some of these are zoo, or ITW, but they are all real threats I feel someone is likely to encounter, since I got them off the internet (and i've verified they are real as each sample must be detected by at least 4 AV's for me to consider it). All scanners were installed on a clean system, without any traces of other anti-virus softwares - between each test the system and directories were cleaned, and the registry was sweeped. Each AV product was treated with a double-reboot, one before, and one after installation. Each scanner was set at its highest possible settings, and was triple checked for proper options and configuration. Most products were the full registered version when possible, others were fully functional unrestricted trials. All products were tested with the current version as of 6-14-04, and the latest definitions for that date. Each product was run through the test set a minimum of 3 times to establish proper settings and reliability, the only product to exhibit some variance on this was F-Secure, which had one scan come up less than the other two without any settings changes indicating a possible stability issue.

The final standings:

1) MKS-Vir

1a) eXtendia AVK

2) Kaspersky 5.0/4.5

2a) McAfee VirusScan 8.0

3) F-Secure

4) GData AVK

5) RAV + Norton (2 way tie)

6) Dr.Web

7) CommandAV + F-Prot + BitDefender (3 Way Tie)

8) ETrust

9) Trend

10) Panda

11) Avast! Pro

12) KingSoft

13) NOD32

14) AVG Pro

15) AntiVIR

16) ClamWIN

17) UNA

18) Norman

19) Solo

20) Proland

21) Sophos

22) Hauri

23) CAT Quickheal

24) Ikarus

Heuristics seemed to play some of a roll in this test, as no AV had every virus in my test in their definitions, and products with stronger heuristics were able to hold their position towards the top of the test. Double/Multi engined products put up strong showings as well, proving to me that the redundacy method works, and I think more AV companies should considering double-engines. The strongest heurisitical AV I noticed was F-Prot/Command, picking up only 247 samples with definitions but they were able to power through 67 additional hits on "Possible Virus" indicators - very strong! Norton with BloodHound activated had 30 Heuristical pickups, and DrWeb rounded up the pack with 20 heuristical pickups. eXtendia AVK grabs the number one slot with double engine scanning, anything the KAV engine missed, the RAV engine picked up with great redundancy on the double engine/definition system. McAfee actually missed only 2 samples with its definitions, but picked those 2 up as "Suspicious File", and therefore, scores nearly perfect as well.

The biggest dissapointments for me were Norman and Nod32. Even with Advanced-Heuristics enabled, NOD32 failed to pick up a large portion of the samples. Norman, while finding some of the toughest samples, managed to completely miss a large portion of them! Showing that their sandbox-emulation system has great potetential, but its far from complete.

________________________________________

Actual test numbers were:

Total Samples/Found Samples (321 total possible) + Number Missed + Detection Percentage

Discovered and tested MKS-Vir2004, from Poland. Surprisingly, this one with caught every sample perfectly on Medium Heuristics. Specifically, nearly 50 samples were picked up Heuristically giving it a perfect score of 321/321. However, when I increased Heuristics to "Super Deep", it picked up an addition 10 more suspicious files. Upon further investigation, it was found that it was picking up signatures of hacktool utilities left over in some of the archives and flagging those files. Indeed, this is impressive. MKS-Vir2004 exhibits the most advanced detection algorithms i've ever seen, clearly it only had signatures for 271 of my samples, but through code emulation, it was able to pick up all 321 samples!! It clearly labeled the Heuristically found ones as things as "Likely Win32 Trojan" or "Highly Suspicious Acting File". In addition, its scanning speed was incredibly quick, and its memory footprint was quite small. Impressive! Furthermore, this is a full featured and fairly polished product that appears to update at least once per day, and tech support responded to me within 5-15 minutes on my emails. Unfortunately, it appears to not be available in the US for purchase at this time.

1a) MKS_Vir 2004 - 321/321 0 Missed - 100%

1b) eXtendia AVK - 321/321 0 Missed - 100%

2a) Kaspersky 5.0 - 320/321 1 Missed - 99.70% (with Extended Database ON)

2b) McAfee VirusScan 8.0 - 319/321 + 2 (2 found as joke programs - heuristically) - 99%

3) F-Secure - 319/321 2 Missed - 99.37%

4) GData AVK - 317/321 4 Missed - 98.75%

5) RAV + Norton (2 way tie) - 315/321 6 Missed - 98.13%

6) Dr.Web - 310/321 11 Missed - 96.57%

7) CommandAV + F-Prot + BitDefender (3 Way Tie) - 309/321 12 Missed - 96.26%

8) ETrust - 301/321 20 Missed - 93.76%

9) Trend - 300/321 21 Missed - 93.45%

10) Avast! Pro - 299/321 22 Missed - 93.14%

11) Panda - 298/321 23 Missed - 92.83%

12) Virus Buster - 290/321 31 Missed - 90.34%

13) KingSoft - 288/321 33 Missed - 89.71%

14) NOD32 - 285/321 36 Missed (results identical with or without advanced heuristics) - 88.78%

15) AVG Pro - 275/321 46 Missed - 85.66%

16) AntiVIR - 268/321 53 Missed - 83.48%

17) Antidote - 252/321 69 Missed - 78.50%

18) ClamWIN - 247/321 74 Missed - 76.94%

19) UNA - 222/321 99 Missed - 69.15%

20) Norman - 215/321 106 Missed - 66.97%

21) Solo - 182/321 139 Missed - 56.69%

22) Fire AV - 179/321 142 Missed - 55.76%

23) V3 Pro - 109/321 212 Missed - 33.95%

24) Per_AV - 75/321 - 246 Missed - 23.36%

25) Proland - 73/321 248 Missed - 22.74%

26) Sophos - 50/321 271 Missed - 15.57%

27) Hauri - 49/321 272 Missed - 15.26%

28) CAT Quickheal - 21/321 300 Missed - 6%

29) Vir_iT - 10/321 311 Missed - 3%

30) Ikarus - Crashed on first virus. - 0%

Interesting also to note, is the detection level of the US AVK version with KAV+RAV engines was higher than the German version with KAV+BitDefender engines. Several vendors have free versions of their for purchase AV's, we didn't test the free versions, as it would serve no purpose for this test, but based on the results, none of the free versions would have been very impressive anyway. The term "Heuristics" seems like it should be taken very liberally, as some products that claim to be loaded with Heuristics scored miserably on items they clearly didn't have definitions for. Scanning speed was not measured, as it was totally irrelevant to my testing, and on-access scanners were not tested, as it would have been too time consuming, but considering most products have similar on-access engines as on-demand, and use the same database, results most likely, would be very similar.

Cut through the hype, cut through the marketing schemes, this was a real test, with real samples, and none of these samples were provided to the antivirus software vendors in advance. This is real world, and these are likely badguys you'll encounter, since I got them in my real encounters, and all were aquired on the internet in daily activities which anyone out there might be involved in. (Installing shareware, filesharing, surfing, etc). Keep in mind that with ITW tests the AV vendors have full disclosure of what they will be tested on in advance, not so here, so heuristics and real detection algorithms will play a big part, as well as the depth and scope of their definition database.

[gaurav]

I use NOD32 right now. might change my mind after some months, and then it goes on and on....

[GaMeDtX]

norton 2005 for now...

its kinda slow, even on a p4 2.0, 786ram...

i might try nod32

[Nherya]

Kapersky ;)

[JoeBonJoey]

Symantec Corp. all the way