Which is the best Firewall & Virus Checker ?

[ThredNedul]

Hi all,

I have just purchased a brand new PC, after using a Mac for several years. Obviously, security and protection is a major issue with PC's, so I need to install a virus checker and firewall.
Which are the best ones on the market at the moment ?

[P.Pilcher]

Don't know which is the best, but many use the AVG antivirus system which is one kind of best being totally free for home users! It virtualy automatically updates itself if you wish. Since they changed over to incremental updates, updating didn't take very long with a dialup modem. Now I've gone broadband it takes milliseconds!
It is available here (http://www.grisoft.com)

Best of luck.

P.P.

[seacue]

I am loosely associated with a large organization which has thousands of PCs. The organization takes the virus threat very seriously. They have standardized on Norton/Symantec. I've bought it and use it at home and it automatically updates very frequently. I must average 2 e-mails w/ virus each day. It catches them all.

While I am using free Zone Alarm firewall, I don't know if it the "best", but it's highly spoken of.
======
You'll probably also want free POPUp Stopper, Which is very effective at killing popup ads.

I find POPFile to be VERY helpful. It classifies your incoming e-mail and can put the spam into a special folder/directory of your choice. Free, but I have donated. After the first couple of weeks of training, it takes 5 minutes of maintenence a couple of times a week to keep the criteria up to date. With that care, it has a misclassification error rate of 1% or 2%.

MailWasher can be used to manually inspect the Subject, From, and To fields of your email and size BEFORE downloading. This way you can delete the large virus-ladden fake messages before downloading. I don't think I'd bother with it if I had high-speed network access. A good AntiVirus program will kill those messages after download.
===========
Your ISP may also do the popup stopping, and try to do the spam mail classification

Welcome to the PC world of virus targets.

SC

[volrider]

AVG Free Anti Virus and superb www.grisoft.com
Zone Alarm from Zone labs again free with the option of upgrading to a fuller version quite cheap.
I am not keen on Norton stuff but thats a personal view, plus you have to pay for it:ugh:

[BRL]

The man in the pub tells me the best FREE firewall is this, Agnitum outpost firewall free version 1.0 You can get it from here............. (http://www.agnitum.com)

At the moment I have Zone Alarm Pro and Norton Anti-Virus. Both missed the recent worm that I got called something like "Welchworm". :mad:

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

ThredNedul,

If you are running Broadband, I would suggest getting a Hardware Firewall. A good Cable/DSL Router is one of the best ways to, not only protect your computer but, your entire network too.

Another good Antivirus program is Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security (http://www.trendmicro.com/en/products/desktop/pc-cillin/evaluate/overview.htm)

Take Care,

Richard

[spekesoftly]

Zone Alarm's free firewall is popular with many, but I have read of some XP conflict issues.

Sygate (http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf/spf_ov.htm) offer an excellent free alternative, which doesn't appear to suffer in the same way.

[shuttlebus]

Personally, I prefer the Symantec products, which I have been using for about 7 years now. Norton Anti-virus and Personal Firewall integrate nicely and are available (at least in the UK) as a package for about £40 from PC World.

The IT guys at work have specified Macafee, so I guess it comes down to personal choice.

A hardware firewall is nice, but they are quite expensive and only really necessary when you have a large no. of users giving high bandwidth, or so I have been told! (They have their own processor etc, so it doesn't tie up your main machine)

Regards,

Shuttlebus

[The Nr Fairy]

Shuttlebus:

You're right in that a dedicated hardware firewall can be expensive, especially for the high end enterprise stuff, and does offload the work of a software application.

However, at home I've got a NetGear DG834G which has a firewall built in, and it also has a 4 port 10/100Mb Ethernet switch and 802.11G wireless too. All for about £130. And I forgot it has an ADSL modem too which is so easy to set up it's untrue.

Because I use my laptop for work in all sorts of places, I also have ISS' BlackIce firewall and McAfee too. The home PC has the BlackIce firewall and AVG.

To stop popup ads, I have Meaya's PopUp AdFilter, plus "No! Flash" plus Google toolbar - works a treat.

Links for most of the above:

BlackIce (http://www.iss.net/products_services/blackice.php)

Netgear DG834G (http://www.netgear.com/products/prod_details.asp?prodID=223)

Meaya PopUp AdFilter (http://www.meaya.com/)

No! Flash (http://noflash.bbshare.com)

[ThredNedul]

Many thanks for all the feedback and ideas. They have been most helpful.

I am still deciding, but following the responses above, I am heading towards Norton or McAffee. Any other replies would be greatfully acknowledged, but I will be purchasing over the next couple of days. Thanks again.

[WeLieInTheShadows]

I just downloaded Agnitum outpost firewall free version 1.0 - and it's brilliant!!!! Also stops ad;s and pop ups as well!

Have tried Zone Alarm and found it annoying and difficult - Outpost is so simple and easy to use so it gets my thumbs up.

AVG anti-virus has to be the best free AVC software I've found too - get it and forget Norton and their high prices - they also stiff you for more money after a time when you need more updates.

Panic Ware pop-up stopper is brilliant for stopping er.... pop - ups so I would also recommend this as it is a must and makes surfing the net a pleasure again.

Hope this helps someone.

[Mac the Knife]

Regret to disagree about McAfee. I was a long term fan and used McAfee's Viruscan and Internet security suite for ages but just have had too much trouble with it's later incarnations.

And Viruscan 8 seems fraught with "problems" (see http://forums.mcafeehelp.com/ ) - I moved to Norton and a hardware firewall (FreeSCO router) and haven't regretted it.

Norton AV and ZoneAlarm Pro is probably the best combo for a single PC setup.

[rotorcraig]

My votes go to...

Anti-virus: AVG Free Edition (http://free.grisoft.com)

Firewall: Either the XP SP2 firewall, or Kerio Personal Firewall (http://www.kerio.com/kpf_home.html)

And to test that the firewall is doing it's thing, use ShieldsUP! (http://www.grc.com/) at grc.com and select "All service ports". Should come up as 100% Stealth.

RC

[drauk]

Clearly this is going against the popular opinion on here, but I've never used a virus checker on any of my Windows machine and I've never had a virus. Actually I have used a checker a couple of times when I wondered if I had a virus (usually a Norton-derived one), but uninstalled it as soon as it had confirmed I was clean.

They are switched on all the time and are permanently connected to the Internet. I do always use a hardware firewall unless I'm traveling and using wireless in which case it is the built-in XP one. A few months ago installed Microsoft's Anti-spyware Beta, though it has yet to find anything sinister.

I do (carefully) download software. These days I don't use Internet Explorer or Outlook but I did for years.

For the last 12 months most of my desktop work is carried out on Macs, but various PCs are still on and used by me and others.

ThredNedul, as an aside, why the move from Mac to Windows? You don't hear of that very often.

[Stoney X]

I'm another that uses Norton's AntiVirus and Zone Alarm. I also have Norton's AntiSpam running to handle the loads of junk that arrives in my Inbox, and it controls popups as well. I'm very happy with the setup although I wish I had the guts to go skinny-dipping on the web like drauk ;)

Regards
Stoney

[IO540]

I am with Drauk. This may sound c0cky but the best AV / firewall software is not catching anything in the first place.

A router which does NAT (they practically all do) will protect you from *unsolicited* incoming rubbish.

It won't protect you from infected websites exploiting a back door in your web browser; running the very latest updated IE6, or running something like Mozilla (doesn't work properly with some websites) should take care of that one.

It won't protect you from infected emails, which will either exploit a back door in your email program, or will hope that you double-click on the attachment before thinking about it. Running a non-Microsoft email program generally plugs the former hole (although Eudora has been hit too) but only current AV software will plug the latter hole.

For a home user (not running a web/ftp server etc) a firewall will do no more than a NAT router for incoming stuff, and the only outgoing stuff which you will want it to stop is stuff which you have already caught and then it's too late for *you*.

I use current-patched IE6 for me, Mozilla for my kids, and a fairly rare email/usenet program. Never caught anything.

The real challenge today is stopping kids catching stuff. They click on every link on every website. I found 13 viruses the other day, on a PC dedicated to them (which also runs FS2004 for my instrument practice).

If you really want AV software, have a look at Kaspersky (.co.uk). It is the most compatible I've ever used; much better than Norton 2003/2004 or McAfee. I have built a lot of PCs and found K just works whereas the others cause havoc occassionally.

[Toxteth O'Grady]

IO540

a firewall will do no more than a NAT router for incoming stuff

I beg to differ..............

My home router uses NAT but in addition I have it set up with Stateful Packet Inspection and blocking against all of ICMP ping flooding, IP spoofing, zero length IPs, Land Attacks, UDP Port Loopbacks, Snork Attacks, Smurf Attacks, Pings of Death, TCP Xmas Scans, TCP Null Scans, Win Nuke Attacks, TCP Syn Flooding, Ascend Kills, IMAP SYN/FIN Scans, Net Bus Scans and Back Orifice Scans. I also have it set up to block certain URLs and URL Keywords.

:cool:

TOG

[IO540]

TOG

Lovely terminology in this business isn't it :O Only the other day I was explaining to my girlfriend what Back Orifice is.

None of the stuff you list will get in *unsolicited* through a NAT router, because NAT hides the rest of the system behind the port translation.

If you are already running BO then you are stuffed. You may as well run PC Anywhere with no security and tell everybody...

People can mount DOS attacks against the router - fine if they want to waste time. You aren't microsoft.com so why worry?

What will get in is stuff incoming in response to a request from the inside; e.g. when browsing an infected website. Yes, you could config a firewall to block the obvious attacks there but even micro$oft will have patched the obvious holes like that long ago. What you can't do is config your firewall to inspect every downloaded JPEG to see if it has a malformed header - a fairly recent back door into windoze.

Some routers have known back doors. Drayteks do expose their HTTPS config port to the WAN (even when remote admin is disabled; a known bug which they haven't fixed yet) so if you left the password at "admin" there's a way for an outsider to reconfig your router :O

To the average punter, firewalls are a waste of time. Every 5 mins the stupid thing pops up saying "application XXX wants to go outside, yes/no?" and if you click NO then you can't even print to a local printer, can't do lots of things. Adobe Acrobat can't scan for updates and hangs for a while before it gives up, etc. It isn't worth the hassle. Half the popups are pretty obscure.

[Toxteth O'Grady]

IO

I suspect we'll end up violently agreeing with each other at the end of the day.

I was only taking technical exception to your assertion that "a firewall will do no more than a NAT router." Not correct, but having reread your post I can see what you were getting at. The level of protection provided by both is the same due to the nature of the risk the average home user is exposed to

Basic NAT devices are not real firewalls, but they are usually considered ‘good enough’ for most home networks. By not forwarding requests or probes that originate from the internet to your LAN, a NAT device blocks most mischief. A simple NAT device cannot keep hackers from running DOS (Denial Of Service) attacks on you, but individuals rarely get attacked like that. It will keep out people looking for file shares, rogue mail servers and web servers, and most port based exploits. Most also protect against SMURF and WinNuke atatcks. With a NAT device and a good anti-virus program, you should be safe from the most common kinds of internet attacks.

Over and above this an SPI firewall allows the NAT devices to filter out specific kinds of data on your router like SYN flood attacks, IP Spoofing, Teardrop attacks and others. SPI is a general term that can describe a router that filters more kinds of attacks than basic NAT by closely examining packet data structures. Of course, each manufacturer will implement different kinds of SPI so not all SPI routers are equal. Routers with SPI can log attacks.

I do however wholeheartedly agree with you that basic NAT is sufficient protection for most home users and the risk of advanced denial of service attacks is negligible.

I also agree that the risk to home users from spyware/malware that they've inadvertently downloaded is orders of magnitude greater and in this instance a hardware firewall is a chocolate teapot.

:cool:

TOG

[goates]

If you have a home network with people who will click on every link they find, a software firewall is probably a good idea. While Microsoft has patched all known holes in its software, that is definitely not all of them. All it takes is one computer to be infected and start scanning for more computers. As all computers on your network are behind the NAT router, it will not prevent the rest from being infected. Windows XP's firewall will at least help stop this from happening. Anti-virus software can really only prevent viruses it knows about, a firewall doesn't care and will just block traffic that shouldn't be there.

NAT routers will prevent most, if not all, attacks from the 'Net, but as more families setup home networks they won't be enough. Instead of one computer in a house to infect, and then clean, there could be several. Wireless networks are more vulnerable here too as some bored kid down the street could hack into your network behind the router. The current wireless encryption protocols used in most home wireless routers is not very difficult to break and there are ready made tools to help with it.

The pop-ups can be annoying at first, but once the computer and firewall have been setup there shouldn't be any more unless a new program has been installed. Of course the ideal case is that we shouldn't have to waste time and money on stuff like this in the first place.

goates

[gofer]

Thrednedul The ultimate free software list - compiled by PPRUNers (http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=126383)
has to be the place to go - its all be said there.

Also on Firewalls - with the dangers today you must find a solution to be somewhat safe. At the office we are moving to personal firewalls on all 16'000 PC's as the problems have become too great otherwise, in spite of central firewalls at the network entry points!!!. Went live a few weeks ago & wors almost without problems (under 1% of users had something - not bad for an automatic system download).

[kriss1000]

1. Dont use zone alarm its true vector service slows your computer approx 10-15%, hides itself in your registry and more important sends info to other vendors, wonder why its got a free version.

2. Symantec [Norton] also fills your computer with hidden files sends info across the web and slows your computer down. They give it OEM with new computers for 3months
and only stops the ads it wants to, this programme knows what you are doing and relays it.

3. Hardware firewalls are THE BEST I also use Netgear and have done so for some time hardwire and wireless No popups (at all) No ads, No virus, No problems.

I dont have any Anti-Virus programmes running just run AVG Pro version once a month and it never finds anything,
also use adaware SE to catch the small files that come in they are normally not a problem anyway.

Its the usual practice you want No Problems then you have to pay for that...

Netgear Wireless Firewall Router ethernet connected to main desktop-wireless 2nd desktop-2 laptops connected wireless and a PS2 connected wireless.

[Gouabafla]

I've come to this thread late - maybe too late. But for what it's worth, here goes.

I first started using Norton products back in the nineteen eighties - anyone else remember Norton Utilities? Taught me everything I ever needed to know about how a hard disc works. However, I wouldn't allow Norton AV anywhere near my computer. Yes, it is a good anti-virus and always works well in tests, though not significantly better than many others. However, as Kriss100 mentioned it also install hidden files all over your hard disk and slows your computer right down.

If you install Norton (or if it comes free with your computer) and you decide not to use it, you may end up having to edit the registry because the Norton uninstall programmes don't actually uninstall everything. It can be a real pain (thought not always, I admit) getting other antivirus software to run on a machine that once had Norton installed. Rant mode off.

For anti virus I use AVG (I pay for the pro-version) and Avast. I'm actually very impressed by Avast which catches things other AVs have missed. It is free, but it does insist on talking to you, which I hate.

I'd second the comments above about a NAT hardware firewall. They don't cost a lot and are worth getting, but have a software one too. To be honest, the firewall with XP second edition is not at all bad and coupled with a NAT router will do the job.

All of the free firewalls mentioned work fine if you want to go that route. I've found that ZoneAlarm doesn't always work well with a home network, but others haven't had that problem. We have Sygate installed on some of our machines at home/office.

Most virus writers target common software, so avoid using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Mozilla Firefox and Opera are excellent browsers and Thunderbird will handle your mail perfectly well.

In the end, as others have said, avoidance is the best option. Don't visit dodgy websites and don't post your email address on websites, bulletin boards or anywhere else where automatic 'address harvesting' software can read them and target you with SPAM.

[frostbite]

"It is free, but it does insist on talking to you, which I hate."

Bit puzzled by that - I am an enthusiastic supporter of Avast, and the only 'talking' mine does is to tell me (almost daily) that there's an update available, and would I like to download it.

Is that what you meant?

[Tone]

I use ZA because it came cheep with Pipex. Proves to be a right PIA. Every so often it decides to do a virus check and runs an application (vsmon.exe) - this uses most of the system resources, constantly accesses the C drive and takes about 30 or 40 minutes to complete.

Do any of the other packages do this?

Tone

[Gouabafla]

Frostbite. Yup, that's what I mean. Can't stand a computer in the corner of the room talking to me when I least expect it. I mean, if it were offering to make a cup of tea or to let the dog out, I'd be happy. But 'virus database has been updated' in a slighlty mechanical voice when you are concentrating on something else comes as a shock.

Great antivirus though!

[frostbite]

Never heard it 'cos I usually have sound muted, hence the dumb sounding question.

If you go into Avast Settings>Sound, there's a tickbox to turn the sound off.

[Gouabafla]

Done that, it but it still tells me when it updates the virus database.

[JediDude]

I wouldn't touch anything made by Norton with a barge pole.

My votes go to Avast. I also recommend a hardware firewall/router coupled with Sygate.

[SirToppamHat]

Personally I use AVG for Antivirus. However, I pay for mine. Thatsaid, I renew every 2 years, and it costs 50% of the full price each time you renew (so about £6.00 per year). I reckon it's worth it.

STH

[marlowe]

A handy tip for norton users when your free subscription period is coming to an end uninstall norton then reinstall it this tricks it into thinking its being installed for the first time and gives you another year of free updates! have done this for 4 years works everytime and on broadband connection it only takes a minute to update the database you have lost

[Fat Dog]

I've said it before and I'll say it again as no one else has - NOD32 is the best AV out there, and that's not just my opinion. Have a look at something like virus bulletin to see. Norton/Symantec is rubbish and only succeeds because people have heard of it, think it's from a big vendor and assume it's good. Rant over.

[Paris Dakar]

I've used Sygate for the past couple of years and (he say's touching wood) it's been a great firewall (my OS is Win2K)

I did use Norton Professional but when I tried to remove it (there was a problem with the virus auto updates) it wouldn't uninstall? In the end, I did a re-format in order to get rid of all the Symantec files that were hidden in the registry

I now use Avast and I've never had a jot of bother.

[Mac the Knife]

AVG Plus Firewall Edition - http://www.grisoft.com/doc/AvgPlusFw/lng/us/tpl/tpl01?prd=afw.1.0.0 - gets my vote and then some.
Much better value than Norton (2 years for the price of one), less intrusive, uses less resources - generally IMHO a better program overall. I've only got one machine still on Norton and when the contract runs out then I'll switch it to AVG.
Furthermore, AVG provides a free basic AV that isn't bad for folks who can't afford one of the commercial offerings and so I think deserves thanks and support.
The Windows firewall, even in SP2, is pretty basic and only watches traffic coming in, not traffic going out (as would be generated by a worm). But it's better than nothing and free for all you MS fanboyz.
A true independent router + firewall is still the best bet (I like Netgear). The default settings are pretty good, but you can also lock it down as tight as a mouse's earhole.
Avoiding Incompetent Exploder by using Firefox or Opera (I'm becoming quite an Opera fan) and using an alternative email client (Thunderbird or Opera) makes life in general a lot safer.

__________________
"Bother," said Pooh as he struggled with /etc/sendmail.cf, "it never does quite what I want. I wish Christopher Robin was here."

[touch&go]

I use CA etrust anti virus software, it has worked ok for me for the last 3 years and is simple to use but also gets on with the job in the back ground unlike Nortons which tops up all the time, "I don't want to know just get on with the job".

Its also free for the first year see like below:


http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft/