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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

"On the other hand, an antivirus program with up-to-date signatures will protect you from a lot of threats. It'll protect you against viruses, against spyware, against Trojans -- against all sorts of malware. It'll run in the background, automatically, and you won't notice any performance degradation at all"

Now, this may be a bit off-topic, but does anyone know about which software he's talking ? I personally find that most of the virus scanners try desperately to let you know how effective they are, constantly notifying what they have done to help you, to validate their existence.

On the other hand, you have the more minimalistic virus scanners, like ClamAV, but I really can't tell if they're effective or not. I fear they are not.

Anyone has recommendations for a good virus scanner that doesn't suck ? Perhaps pg can make this a request for startups, please ? It's about time this whole industry stopped sucking. :)

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Norton. No wait, hear me out. As many here know, Norton has always been a pig of an antivirus. In 2007 and 2008, it was really, really bad. It went from just slowing computers down to making them unusable. In the face of consumer backlash - even non-technical users were boycotting it - they made Norton Antivirus 2009. It uses ~10MB of RAM, and is now one of the faster scanners out there. It still gets Advanced/Advanced+ ratings from AV Comparatives, and updates signatures about every 5 minutes. Plus it has a "gaming" mode which puts even less stress on your system.

Does it really update signatures every 5 minutes?

Seems a bit excessive.

Yeah, but it makes people feel better :)

Well I haven't used anti-virus in a long time since switching to OSX but when I was on Windows, I was always a big fan of ESET NOD32.

Tech support in my company has to constantly deal with false positives of our software with NOD32. I don't know how effective it is catching real trojans/viruses, but I know it sucks at catching non-trojans/non-viruses.

Actually, it sounds like it's pretty good at catching non-viruses and non-trojans...

ClamAV is actually pretty effective at detecting malware it knows about. I've seen it work on multiple occasion even with non in-the-wild viruses. However because it lacks real time scanning and cleaning, it's clearly not a first line of defense yet.

A better bet would be F-Prot or Nod32 which seem far lighter and a tad more quiet about their business except when a malware is actually found (which is also customizable I believe).

However, I see a hard task ahead of any startup that wants to come up in this field. Writing sig definitions for the 100000+ viruses already difficult is a massive initial undertaking. The older players already have most of it written down but a startup would have to put in a ton of effort just to catch up.

Why do you need real time scanning?

You download an app/email attachment etc, check it and then install/open it.

The problem is remembering each time you do this. After a while it gets painful to repetitively do the same. Its just easier to install an alternative which comes with a real time scanner.

True, the best way would be to have OS support for automatic quarantining of anything from outside until it has been checked.

Vista sort of has this but it doesn't clear the suspicion, so if you download a simple utility (or even a help file) it will warn you every time you open it - unless it comes inside an installer.

I really liked Microsoft's Windows Defender, and I was pleased to find out that they recently expanded it into a full (and free) AV suite: Security Essentials:

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/

It runs unobtrusively in the background (only a tray icon), is simple to use, and doesn't install additional cruft (e.g., the AVG IE toolbar).

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