At BoxAid one of the most common issues we deal with is viruses and trojans on a daily basis. Well you may be reading this and saying “Well that would never happen to me, I paid $40 for McAfee, Symantec, Trend, Kaspersky (insert your AV product here)” Surely, when you pay hard earned dollars for one of the anti-virus products you are getting the “best” protection money can buy. Even the free anti-malware solutions like AVG, Avira, Avast, Malwarebytes and Microsoft Security Essentials do a great job of protecting you from the viruses that come out on a daily basis.
Why The Best Anti-Virus Products Sometimes Don’t Work
Anti-virus software, regardless of the vendor you choose, is software that contains a list of viruses, and dangerous programs. Today there are millions of viruses and trojans that exisit in the wild. As you access a file in Windows, such as your resume, your anti-virus program will analyze your resume looking for a unique fingerprint on the file and compare it to it’s list of dangerous programs. If the file you accessed is not on that “dangerous program” list then the file opens and you go on your way. On the other hand, if the file you access is on the “dangerous program” list then your AV product will stop you from executing that file and delete it in less than a second before it infects your PC. All that is great stuff and in a perfect world your virus gets deleted or cleaned and you continue playing Solitaire and Chat Roulette.
Updating The List of Dangerous Viruses
As we know the Internet is literally expanding every second. In the time it took you to read this article 100 new web sites will have been opened on the Internet. That same concept applies to the authors who write the viruses all over the world. This means there are 100 to 300 new viruses being written per day. Lets say that malware writer releases a new virus right now, clearly your anti-virus product that you paid good money for will not know about it. No anti-virus product, no matter how much you paid for it, can predict the future. That means your anti-virus vendor will have to do three things.
1. Discover this new virus in countless ways but typically the virus sample must be manually submitted to the vendor
2. Write a signature for it that your anti-virus product will use
3. Push out that signature to your desktop that you are downloading on a daily basis.
These updates are typically automated and happen in the background on your machine. Depending on your anti-virus product it could pull updates several times per day or just once per day. These updates are critical to keeping your protection current because once that list of dangerous programs gets old then you are getting ZERO new protection from the viruses that are coming out on a daily basis.
Window of Opportunity for a New Virus
Step One mentioned above is the most difficult step and is what gives a new virus the opportunity to spread. Typically the anti-virus vendor must wait for someone to submit a sample of the new virus to them so they can write a signature for it. This means until your AV vendor writes protection and you are unlucky enough to get this brand new virus then you are officially infected and sometimes you don’t even know it. If its a loud obnoxious virus that keeps giving you popups then you will have a clue that you are infected but your AV product is doing nothing about it. If it’s a quiet more stealthy virus, then its logging all your passwords and usernames to your bank account, email, facebook and sending them to the author of the virus across the Internet and you are none the wiser. This window of time ranges and is often never discussed because the AV vendors never want to let the consumer know that there is such a window where you are completely unprotected. At BoxAid we constantly get to see this window get exploited because 95% of our virus removal calls, the user has a reputable and up-to-date anti-virus product on their desktop. We then have to MANUALLY find the virus on the PC and correlate it against the 41 different AV vendors (yes there are 41 anti-virus vendors out there) and see which ones offer protection for this new threat. During this analysis we can “guestimate” when the virus came out based on the number of AV vendors that offer protection. We are seeing an average of 20 to 30 days before your AV vendor gives you protection from a new virus.
Which Anti-Virus Vendor Offers Protection the Fastest
When our customers call in to BoxAid about a new virus that was not caught on their PC, they often feel a bit betrayed by their AV vendor and always ask what anti-virus program should they switch to. There is no clear winner. We see all the AV vendors missing new viruses, its just impossible to predict what virus will come out tomorrow. We can say this, there is no advantage to paying money for your anti-virus program. The paid programs like McAfee and Symantec offer extra added value features but the the free programs do an equal job from protecting you from new viruses. So what does this mean to you? Your only defense agains those new viruses is just being careful when surfing the Internet and checking your email. Make sure you are following the rules out there and you should stay virus free. Heres a few articles from us on how to stay safe. If you enjoyed this article leave us a comment below and visit our home page.
http://www.boxaid.com/word/viruses-and-malware/rise-in-hacked-gmail-hotmail-and-yahoo-email/
http://www.boxaid.com/word/viruses-and-malware/how-to-prevent-getting-infected-by-viruses-and-trojans/
About George Dover
George Dover is one of the Microsoft Certified Technicians that works at BoxAid.com. He is the primary blog contributor and has helped thousands of customers calling into BoxAid on a daily basis. Connect with me on Google+
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In my opinion Avira Antivir is still the best solution. It’s fast and lightweight.
Got to agree with you, some of the free AV products do a great job. Sometimes the Free products do a better job than the commercial products, this is because the people who write viruses test them against the major players, to make sure that their new creation isnt going to get caught. The only thing to remember is that they are not licensed for commercial use. i.e. They are free for a home PC, but you cannot use them on a business PC.
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