A couple of months ago I related the problems I had with NIS. Since then I've been using AVG7 without any problems.
My brother however insisted he wanted to use Norton Antivirus 2004. His net habits aren't too safe, but he thought NAV should have protected him. How wrong he was. Maybe NIS would have done better, but his comp isn't too powerful to begin with.
The last week or so he has been plagued by pop-ups, which he thought he had tracked down to a rogue piece of software. He cleared it off, but it kept returning. So yesterday he asked me to try and sort it out for him. After an hour of removing various ActiveX controls (IE, don't you just love it?) only to have them reappear, I realised there must be some sort of virus at work.
I removed NAV, and installed AVG7. As soon as I started IE, AVG leapt into action and warned me about a trojan. I decided to keep off the internet for a while, and do a full system scan. AVG found no less than SEVEN trojans which hadn't been spotted by NAV. Perhaps a full system scan by NAV would have spotted them, but I'm doubtful.
Once the system was clear, I also installed Zone Alarm. When I went back on the net, the number of high risk attacks on his comp was unbelievable, but fortunately none are now getting through.
Why didn't NAV detect those trojans? Because Symantec class them as Spyware. But what thay actually do is download binary images of other software, load them into memory, then execute them without ever writing anything to disk. The result is that your machine is wide open to the world. A firewall would have stopped some of this, but so would proper protection against trojans.
I used to swear by Norton as the best AV around. Now I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
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