New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
http://www.oocities.org/alreaud/Humor/Page1_IMG/Howtostopcomputerviruses.jpg
Oh god. I actually agree with @joepie91 for once...
@Nexus: You have a flawed concept about computer virus infection vectors, but I concede that skilled technical people can live whithout antivirus on Windows desktops. I also have some desktops whithout antivirus. But: antivirus software is still the most practical and easy solution to the computer virus issue. The antivirus does automatically some task you should othervise do manually: check for unwanted/unknown processes, check/clean sensitive registry values, empty browser caches and Windows temporary folders, have a maniacal attention to known potential virus carriers (USB sticks, network shares ...). If you don't use antivirus software and don't do those tasks, you are bound to get nasty surprises. The Microsoft free antivirus is a good solution for a basic protection. It is basically the Microsoft corporate (paid) antivirus solution with the group policy management function removed. It works.
Seriously, how often does it happen that a Chrome or Flash 0day remote code execution exploit gets used on a big scale before an update comes out that fixes it?
And what are the odds that people who have access to such exploits use some shitty Zeus bot that your AV can discover?
I use lots of sticks, many from unsafe sources. While nothing is executed (took care to disable everything), there could be infected files there i need to see. Sure, can also disable PDFs and use safe mode, but why bother to do all those tasks by hand and risk breaking functionality when I have free antivirus to take care of that ?
After all, I pay for Windows. It is insecure by design, but at least they offer an antivirus. Not using it makes no sense, especially since it is so unintrusive.
M
Security Essentials, Chrome, and OpenDNS