Antivirus Program

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Do anyone use McAfee’s antivirus and internet security? I don't know what to buy for protection. Can someone help me?

Hi Kitty,

I once opted for McAfee when I first acquired a PC about three years ago. Within a few months, the program began to play up. and I tried to uninstall it without success. I then got in touch with my internet service provider's technical help department, and it took them almost three hours to get rid of it - at one point it looked as if the whole operating system would need to be reinstalled. I've also bought a couple of second-hand laptops with McAfee on them, and it's been a problem there as well, though thankfully one which was easier to deal with. McAfee is now part of Intel, and its own founder has claimed that the system these days is rubbish. He seems to be a very bizarre character himself, but he's probably right about that....

Quite a few security systems, such as AVG and Norton, seem to be very difficult to get off one's computer if one wishes to do so. I have Avast Free antivirus on one of my laptops and it seems okay, though it's very persistent with its attempts to get me to upgrade to its paid version, and I'm not sure it'd be easy to uninstall if I became fed up of it.

The rest of my PCs run Microsoft's own free antivirus systems. These aren't supposed to be as effective as the likes of Avast and Norton, but none of these machines seem to have had any virus issues, and I suspect the Microsoft systems are perfectly adequate if you supplement them with an anti-malware product such as Malwarebytes Free. The MS antivirus programs are Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows 7 and Windows Defender for Windows 8 and 10.

The best-rated 'paid for' system by the way seems to be Kaspersky, though I have no experience of that.

Avast as suggested is good, i've used it earlier. AVG is ok, Clam AV is free, but it comes with a few false positives. Spent too many hours chasing those down (uninstalled).

Commercial AV i'd go with would be F-Secure. Kaspersky is ok. Also some sort of whitelisting protection can be useful (it's built into windows, google it). If you can find something that sandboxes malicious code, go with that AV (i know panda had that before most others, but i dont know the state of that product today).

If you want to run software without worrying, get Virtualbox (or vmware if you have the cash), install the OS of your choise and play around, if you get infected, you can just revert back or throw away the image and begin again, either by copying the virtual harddrive image or reinstalling the OS on a new one.

At our office, those computers with antivirus run Kapersky. They offer a pretty good deal for multiple computers/cell phones.

My computers don't have antivirus since there are none available for them as far as I know -- Linux and OpenBSD.

Oh no, there are a few AV for Linux/Unix:

* ClamAV
https://www.clamav.net/downloads

* Sophos
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/f ... linux.aspx

* Comodo
https://www.comodo.com/home/internet-se ... -linux.php

* F-Prot
http://www.f-prot.com/download/home_use ... linux.html

* BitDefender (Trial)
https://www.bitdefender.com/business/an ... nices.html

* Avast
https://www.avast.com/linux-server-antivirus

* ESET (Trial)
https://www.eset.com/me/home/products/antivirus-linux/

* Avira
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Antivirus/Avira

I forgot to mention in my previous post that McAfee on numerous occasions issued warnings about Wrong Planet being a 'dangerous' site.

Funny, many other scanning engines report it as clean:
https://virustotal.com/sv/url/e9444e844526cf2a9bd05e2eed36bf793e41d92db7b784009882e64925df19b1/analysis/1502036170/

One reason why to stay clear of McAfee... some of those lists are political in nature and there could be any reason why a site is on such blacklist/warninglist.

I want to buy Kapersky, but it is for 3 devices; Windows, iPad & iPhone. I don't have Windows.

Go for Avast. My reason, It's free. You have the option to pay for additional features, but for myself, I don't need the extra features. It also updates regularly. As far as security is a concern, just don't go onto websites you're not familiar with. If you're really unsure about a certain website use WOT as a browser extension. Those are the things I use as far as staying protected when going online.

As far as from what I have heard, McAfee and Norton may also slow your computer down because of the constant scanning of your computer, using up computer resources in the process.

I went with Trend Micro & I also downloaded Password Manager, it say it will protect my passwords & I can save other things like personal information, credit or debit card numbers, stuff like that. But all my passwords are in my settings in Safari.