Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

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Anecdote time.

A couple of weeks ago, my neighbors asked me for some help with their printers. Their wifi printer had suddently stopped working, then they bought a new one (which of course costed less than a ink cartridge) which also didn't work.

After the initial shock of dealing with windows 10 (I hadn't used windows, especially a home version, for years), I found out, by plugging a cable, that the printer actually worked just fine. Checking the wifi router admin page showed that the printer was correctly connecting to the network.

At that point I suspected firewall issues. The Windows firewall control panel was disabled claiming to be managed by the antivirus. I looked at MSE, and it was also disabled. I asked my neighbors and they said that they had been using MSE but McAfee had somehow appeared recently on their computer (possibly sneakingly installed by some unrelated application).

And of course McAfee was there, already demanding protection money. I uninstalled it after clicking through dozen of scary popups warning that the computer would be overwhelmed by viruses, my bank account emptied and my identity stolen.

Immediately after that a popup appeared from Windows system tray telling me that my computer was unprotected and I should install Avast immediately. I quickly got rid of that only for yet another popup to appear (for some AV that I had never heard of).

Eventually I managed to get rid of all AVs, re-enabled MSE, and suddenly the printer started working again.

I think MSE should really just treat every other AV as malware, although I'm sure MS would get a lot of backlash.

My parents Windows laptop came with a free copy of McAfee, which rendered it COMPLETELY useless. That is not an exaggeration. It wasn't a fast laptop but it should be able to browse mails and Internet. It couldn't. After Uninstalling the AV software it was like I had replaced the HDD with an SSD. I will never ever use any 3rd party AV software. It's just glorified bloatware as far as I'm concerned.

I'm upvoting because I agree that, in my experience, you get no more than what you pay for in relation to anti-virus.

Those free AVs and ones bundled by mega ISPs? Prepare to pay in computer resources, and even then your protection is probably only mostly adequate.

The only true anti-virus is awareness and user education. Risky behavior and unwise reactions to suspicious emails are the two infection vectors that secure software can't stop.

This has been my consistent experience with McAfee in particular. I worked for 4 years in low level tech support, fixing computers for people that were sold in retail. We were required to recommend Anti-Virus software to our customers, and the whole store consistently recommended Webroot (which we sold) not because it was particularly good, but because it was the only option we had that didn't slow the machine to a crawl. Replacing McAfee with almost anything else on the market felt like it doubled the machine's speed.

I personally haven't run antivirus software for years on my own machines. I recommended that all of my customers learn basic security practice instead, and reminded them that the antivirus program they used is there as a tool to help them, and not a replacement for safe browsing.

To be fair, kaspersky is better than the others. It screws up hour machine much less than most av programs.

Mine too.

Mother-in-law called because she could connect to Internet.

Turned out McAfee was just demanding their protection fee.

So: McAfee bad. Cannot speak for Kaspersky, haven't used it for years. Defender is OKish.

But one that I sometimes recommend is Vipre from Sunbelt Software.

My builds are slightly faster with it and on one occasion it took down an infection that no other AV I tried managed.

(Of course this can just be because the malware writers didn't care to code in resistance to it but then again it supports Kasperskys claim that diversity is good.)

Do I sense a possible previous GS Agent? If not, I do remember those days well. Clients would constantly come into the store because the trial version of Norton/McAfee etc completely broke the machine's network stack.

Once an agent, always an agent. :)

I often hear people promoting common sense over antivirus solutions and while I do agree that some degree of common sense is required, there are still a lot of attacks that can bypass safe browsing.

In the past we've seen malware injected into ads that then load on legitimate sites. Hosts get hacked too and their sites can then be used to serve malware.

You're right to teach your customers safe browsing habits but they do still need an antivirus as well.

Disclaimer: antivirus solutions are not perfect either. Particularly with new attacks. So while I do advocate using them it's also good not to take them for granted (e.g. assuming you can get away with running any old binary you've downloaded from Limewire because you have an AV installed). The best approach is common sense with the AV as a safety net.

> In the past we've seen malware injected into ads that then load on legitimate sites

Just another reason to use an adblocker.

A major part of safe browsing (and safe computer usage in general) is an ad-blocker that defaults to requiring you to whitelist the content you want to let through.

Have you found a workable way of doing that?

I manually whitelist in uMatrix, but it's pretty inconvenient and does not stop attacks coming from domains previously whitelisted/deemed safe.

uMatrix is the best I have. I've accepted the inconvenience as minor in comparison; but previous whitelisting is a problem that I actually hadn't considered. I can't think of any reasonable way to prevent that - even catching changed/new scripts and requiring approval to run them won't help if all you can see are minimized scripts.

I guess you could have a kind of crowd-sourced de-minificarion project, combined with checking script hashes, but I think that would be considered a form of pirating and thus require a lot of piracy-related workarounds. Perhaps one could have a de-minification tool which only stores the steps to deminfy a script, and then you could apply it based on the script's hash.

Back in the 90s McAfee was the best AV around. By quite some margin as well from what I recall. But then around 1998/2000 - i forget the exact year - the AV went from being nimble and reliable to a slow and troublesome mess. It went from being a market leader to one of the worst solutions available. And it seem to happen in just one version number jump.

Ever since then, it's been consistently awful to the point of ridicule. But sometimes I have flashbacks to when even I would recommend it.

Same thing happened with AVG, and then Avast. Fortunately Microsoft Security Essentials came out about the same time every other simple AV became a bloated mess.

The problem now is that MSE doesn't seem to keep up with the latest viruses and hacks. My kids wrecked our Windows 7 computer twice by trying to download Minecraft addons. (First time it installed an ad-bot that was running hidden Firefox windows in the background and swamping our internet connection by loading pages and clicking ads. Second time it was a rootkit that added it's own "recovery" partition to the drive; which it used to reinfect the computer even after I wiped and reinstalled Windows 7.)

Now we have Windows 10 and they all have their own non-admin accounts, so hopefully they can't install anything super destructive.

Weren't you running non-admin accounts on Windows 7? That goes a long way to making sure that any damage can be undone.

Coming in to say the same thing. In my case it was Avast! which says its name through the speakers every 30 seconds while you're using the computer for some reason. I think it also tries to install toolbars in the browser, which is not really the role of antivirus software.

With Microsoft in the OEM hardware business, hopefully the end of this era is coming. Sure, Microsoft's own pushes towards Edge and Office 365 are annoying... but easily disabled without any scary warnings. Maybe Edge is better for people than Chrome, I dunno, I like Chrome and haven't bothered to try Edge.

I like anecdote time!

When I was very young I had this job where I would go to people's houses to repair their computers. What I would often find would be computers so slow to the point of being unusable. After a few months I'd realized there were only two scenarios here:

- Computer full of spyware. CleanUp / Restore and anti-spyware + anti-virus installation would often work wonders for the customers.

- Computer running Panda Antivirus. Uninstalling Panda and installing Avast would always work wonders for the customers. Best thing was when they've asked how I solved their problem so quickly and I replied "uninstalling Panda". "But I paid for it" would be their response, to which I would follow up with a "call them and get a refund".

Anti-virus, what an interesting industry!

The funny thing is that Avast which used to be my go to choice for the past 5-7 years has gotten quite bloated and intrusive as well.

They even bought/merged with AVG which was quite annoying 10 years ago.

So MSE it is for friends/relatives.

I miss the days when one could run the virus scanner once a month and not have it always be on.

In fact some of my Win7 computers behind NAT I run without any active anti-virus.

I've lived through and heard about this so many times that it stopped being an anecdote for me a long time ago; it's just how hostile most of the 3rd party AV applications are.

They, IMHO, should be given no system access and should only be allowed to implement something like IsHarmful(s DataStream) (bool, string) - maybe a little more and that's it.

The thing is, modern antiviruses rely on context to classify data as malware or not. It is fine if antivirus.exe is trying to remove itself; not so much if it is being removed by calc.exe.

It's much more useful to look for suspicious behavior than to try to classify streams of data as "harmful".

This is part the AV/FW vendors fault, part Microsoft's fault. Yes, on Windows the security products are too often as nasty as the malware they claim to protect you from but Microsoft has failed to design a sane security experience that works with legit 3rd party vendors.

Currently on Windows 10, it's surprisingly difficult for "normal" users to know if av/fw are available by default and how they work. How the built-in security works with 3rd party solutions is more confusing, even for power users.

I had a similar issue with my dad a year ago or so. Solved with a chromebook.

Same deal with my wifes machine. We just backed up her documents and gave it the ol' nuke-n-pave treatment.

I can't be arsed dealing with that crap.

> Anecdote time

This isn't an anecdote. This is life for many, many users.

nice anecodete as well: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=is%3Aanswer+avast

not all of them are bad, but there sure are a lot of them along the lines of 'disabling/uninstalling Avast solved the problem'

I really think desktop computers are too complicated for the average user, and MS should move to a managed application model like apple is doing. Only apps approved by MS will be allowed to install UNLESS you disable this in the control panel somewhere with ample warnings. MS Could then force these companies to clean up their acts.

While practical this creates instant monopolies.

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