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Does reliable PC security have to cost money?

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icekin:
One good piece of advice: disable autorun. completely.

If you do that and are a bit careful (and, sorry but it's true, stop using IE or anything IE-based) you really shouldn't be infected. Oh yeah, if you're on a LAN you'll want a firewall, but XP's native firewall is good enough for that.

-f0dder (November 05, 2007, 08:19 AM)
--- End quote ---

Autorun is one of the first things I switch off after a default XP install, using TweakUIXP. K-Meleon and Firefox are the main browsers on my computer, IE is only used when some amateur site does not display or work properly.

I use XP's firewall and in fact, I have disabled file sharing over LAN completely, which means I can access other's files, but they can't access mine. I used to have Tiny and later Kerio Firewall. Both were great programs, but an annoyance since I had to create a rule for every program that wanted to connect to the internet. I haven't used a dedicated firewall program since 2003, but my D-Link router is supposed to come with an inbuilt firewall as well. However, I think all it really does is block unused ports. A trojan can always still communicate over the open ports though.

Right now, I am thinking of going back to installing a dedicated firewall for better security, but I know its no protection against viruses entering through physical media such as thumb drives. In fact, I would guess that's where all my viruses have ever come from.

f0dder:
If you use XP's firewall, have disabled autorun, and generally don't use IE... then how the hell did you get hit? You must've manually run something off his USB drive :'(

When connected to the internet, using a router with NATing is imho a must. And if you do that, with no default "send all traffic to a DMZ host" but only manually specified port forwarding (and uPNP, it's not as bad as people say), you really shouldn't be hit.

iphigenie:
F0dder: Yes but if he manually ran something then the virus scanner's on-access protection should have kicked in and caught it! I think it seems avast has indeed missed that one or it fell outside the scope of the free product.

Icekin: Glad you were ok clearing it all though.

To go back to the indirect question in the thread, as we are all software junkies anyway:

You might not get the same level of smooth packaged protection from free products, but you can build a very secure PC with free products - you just need 5+ layers of them:

A free virus scanner, I tend to recommend avira for people who can put up with its slightly "techie" feel and not be intimidated. But avg, avast and a few others all give a good protection against viruses, normally! The difference between free virus scanners and commercial ones is typically not the virus protection but all the other things you get around it: additional layers of protections (spyware, trojans etc.), easier interface etc.
On some of my pcs I use bitdefender, the commercial version but this is newly available in a light free version. Not sure how it compares but I suspect the definitions are in sync with the commercial product. On my mom and some friend's pcs I use avast or avira.

A free firewall - I am not up to date on these at all

Another layer of protection is to have something like winpatrol (or any similar "changes" watcher) to watch for suspicious changes in IE configuration, or the registry etc. I use winpatrol (free) and regrun (not free) on different PCs and might buy WP pro just to support it.

Another layer are the trojan and spyware tools - I use boclean, SpywareGuard, SpywareBlaster. They are simple and quite unobtrusive.

And a good backup/image tool, as sometimes it is easier to roll back than try to clean.

Theres a lot more sophisticated stuff available for free, my head buzzes everytime i go to wilder's security forums, i cant keep up with that field anymore! You have application walls and registry guards, spyware scanning tools and resident sniffers and virtual sandboxes...

I stick with less intensive methose as I have a rather conservative behaviour and dont think I need that many layers.

f0dder:
A free firewall - I am not up to date on these at all
-iphigenie (November 05, 2007, 11:44 AM)
--- End quote ---
The windows XP firewall will do just fine, if you get to the point where you need outgoing protection you're either (A) paranoid or (B) already screwed by malware.

I'd love to get into the habit of using sandboxing stuff; not as malware protection, but when testing out shareware apps and the like. This system is pretty junky by now :-[

mouser:
Getting back to the original question:

I think your point was key -- an antivirus tool can't be good unless it is CONSTANTLY updated.  That basically rules out all amateur hobby solutions.

So basically if you want a good antivirus you are going to have to go with a product coming from a company that is making consistent income that they can afford to constantly be keeping it up to date at a fast pace.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't find such an antivirus tool that is free for home use, as some good commercial products make their money from commercial sales (for example AntiVir).

On the other hand, this might be one of those categories of programs where the proper question to ask yourself is something like:  Is it worth a few bucks a year for me to have the best program if it is a commercial product?

For me the answer is yes.  The cost of the best commercial antivirus and firewall tools are cheap enough and the importance is high enough, that i wouldn't take cost into consideration for this kind of product.

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