Skip to main content

Antivirus and Antispyware for the Home and Corporate user

Since endpoint protection is of growing importance in the security industry, you will see some major technical advanced this year.  I expect this to be one of the hot buttons for acquisition as technologies such as whitelisting and more connected heuristics create a more advanced software landscape.

Since I have quite a bit of experiance and I do keep on top of the industry I believe that I should outline some of the tools I recommend in both cases.

One side note, I do not use MacOS so I cannot recommend any software for Macs.  If Apple can apply some of the success they have had with iOS to OSX then I may have to spend more time thinking about them on the PC front.

Corporate AV/Antispyware:

  • Mcafee - Does a good job with a suite, but ePO is still a bloated tool which is hard to manage effectively without creating gaps.
  • Symantec - I don't recommend the products for endpoint protection, in my experience I see too many missed viruses with the product.
  • Trend Micro - Does a good job at a lower price point than the big two in AV
  • GFI Vipre - My personal favorite, this is a cheap easy endpoint antivirus solution which works very well.  There are a few gaps in the product they should shore up in the next 6 months, but overall I would recommend this product in a corporate environment.

I have more I would recommend, but I am not going to cover them.  Products I would like to test for corporate use:  Avast and Microsoft.  If I have time I will try both of them in the next couple weeks.

Personal AV/Antispyware:

  • Microsoft Security Essentials - This is what I would tell my mom to use, it works, and its maintenance free!  Sometimes this is the best option for a typical end user.
  • Avast - This is what I recommend and run.  In version 6.0 they have added a lot of new features and improvements.  
  • AVG - Another very good option, this would probably be my second choice personally
  • Microsoft Defender - Its free and does a decent job preventing spyware
  • Spybot S&D - Free and works great for spyware infections
  • CCleaner - Free, and this is a great overall system cleanup tool.  It will fix spyware issues, registry issues, and other problems.  If you don't run this type of tool every month or so, your windows installation will slow down in a much shorter amount of time.

Comments

Skadz said…
For home stuff, you should also check out malwarebytes.org. Their program saved my ass when trying to get some crap off a buddy's computer a few months ago. None of the other virus checker/cleaners I tried got it off.
Sunday, February 27, 2011 10:11:00 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dynatrace Growth Misinformation

For my valued readers: I wanted to point out some issues I’ve recently seen in the public domain. As a Gartner analyst, I heard many claims about 200% growth, and all kind of data points which have little basis in fact. When those vendors are asked what actual numbers they are basing those growth claims on, often the questions are dodged. Dynatrace, recently used the Gartner name and brand in a press release. In Its First Year as an Independent Company, Gartner Ranks Dynatrace #1 in APM Market http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/06/prweb12773790.htm I want to clarify the issues in their statements based on the actual Gartner facts published by Gartner in its Market Share data: Dynatrace says in their press release: “expand globally with more than three times the revenue of other new generation APM vendors” First, let’s look at how new the various technologies are: Dynatrace Data Center RUM (DCRUM) is based on the Adlex technology acquired in 2005, but was cr
10 comments
Read more

Vsphere server issues and upgrade progress

So I found out that using the host update tool versus Vcenter update manager is much easier and more reliable when moving from ESXi 3.5 to 4.0. Before I was using the update manager and it wasn't working all that reliably. So far I haven't had any issues using the host update tool. I've done many upgrades now, and I only have 4 left, 3 of which I am doing this weekend. Whenever I speak to vmware they always think I'm using ESX, when I prefer and expect that people should move to the more appliance model of ESXi. With 4.0 they are pretty much on par, and I'm going to stick with ESXi. On one of my vsphere 4.0 servers (virtualcenter) its doing this annoying thing when I try to use the performance overview:   Perf Charts service experienced and internal error.   Message: Report application initialization is not completed successfully. Retry in 60 seconds.   In my stats.log I see this.   [28 Aug 09, 22:28:07] [ERROR] com.vmware.vim.stats.webui.startup.Stat
7 comments
Read more

Misunderstanding "Open Tracing" for the Enterprise

When first hearing of the OpenTracing project in 2016 there was excitement, finally an open standard for tracing. First, what is a trace? A trace is following a transaction from different services to build an end to end picture. The latency of each transaction segment is captured to determine which is slow, or causing performance issues. The trace may also include metadata such as metrics and logs, more on that later. Great, so if this is open this will solve all interoperability issues we have, and allow me to use multiple APM and tracing tools at once? It will help avoid vendor or project lock-in, unlock cloud services which are opaque or invisible? Nope! Why not? Today there are so many different implementations of tracing providing end to end transaction monitoring, and the reason why is that each project or vendor has different capabilities and use cases for the traces. Most tool users don't need to know the implementation details, but when manually instrumenting wi
2 comments
Read more