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The last time your AntiVirus saved you!
tuntis:
It's ironic that whenever I've been infected by a virus, it's not the antivirus that's rescued me, it's some small utility designed specifically to remove the virus in question. Instead of removing viruses with your antivirus software, remove them with standalone tools made by the people behind your antivirus!
wraith808:
The only time by box was ever infected was by code red. I lost a *lot* of stuff then. I had stopped running AV because I hated (and still hate- even more!) the whole subscription model. Since then, I've been running it continuously, but when I think about it, even if I *had* AV installed, I'm not sure it would have stopped Code Red...
wr975:
Common sense is most likely good enough to avoid virus/trojan infection, but one error and ... :-\. It's good to have a "backup".
I never used a resident AV, but manually checked suspicious files. This was good for many years. But two months ago I stopped thinking for a moment and clicked on a wrong file. Booom... A trojan installed with defense capabilities. Disabled AV. Made sure I couldn't launch anti-Trojan tools and so on. Very clever. Very annoying. Instead of wasting hours to get rid of it, I made a backup of the system partition and restored an old image + wasted some hours to reconfigure my system configuration. Avira found the trojan in numerous places in the backup image. I felt a bit stupid. I've 2 gigs of RAM and a Intel Dual Core. It's not like I'm running a 800 Mhz machine with 256 MB memory. I think my machine can spare some CPU cycles for a resident AV. But I disabled it and had to pay the price. So, now I run a resident AV (Avira Personal with nags disabled). To answer this thread's question: My AV didn't save me, because I disabled it, but it would have. :)
Dirhael:
It's ironic that whenever I've been infected by a virus, it's not the antivirus that's rescued me, it's some small utility designed specifically to remove the virus in question. Instead of removing viruses with your antivirus software, remove them with standalone tools made by the people behind your antivirus!
-tuntis (May 23, 2008, 03:32 PM)
--- End quote ---
Hmm...well the thing is, the whole point should be not to get infected in the first place. Your approach really only works if you know that you have a virus (and which one), and I would say that the most dangerous ones are the ones you don't notice but just quietly keeps sending out data from your system without destroying or slowing things down...like account information/credit card info.
f0dder:
Common sense is not good enough anymore, with all the exploitable software components on a normal PC. You don't even even need to visit naughty sites, you can be hit by cross-site scripting, hacked banner servers delivering malware, etc.
Not running IE, using an adblocker, optionally disabling flash, and running a 64bit system... that will get you a far way. But you still won't be untouchable.
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