Malware protection for W7

[Loose rivets]

I was proceeding slowly with any form of add-ons for W7, seeing who was using what. That was fine when I had two hard drives, but stuck with one, I'm needing to get sorted with protection. Anyone using MS's free anti-virus with W7? Or any other free-bees that are known to work with this latest OS?

I noted the comments about not combining different facets of malware protection. Right now I'm loathe to load any of the products that only go up to Vista. Once bitten, and all that.

[Bushfiva]

AVG Anti-virus Free was the only one known to work with Win7 at the time I installed. Microsoft is "working with" the ones listed at Windows 7: Security software providers. Right now I'd imagine most antiviruses have been updated to work with Win7. Avira and Avast, for example.

[green granite]

zone alarm has a beta for 7, avast works, presumably windows defender, and as Bushfiva says AVG and what's on the list.

[Loose rivets]

I was looking through the MS list just before I posted, and there didn't seem to be any mention of free stuff on their site of course. Oddly, their product wasn't on the W7 list!


Avast seemed well recommended on this forum, but I found that it reported ever increasing lists of places that it couldn't access. Odd that. Never found anything nasty...but then, Sod's law says that One only gets nasties when One is not prepared.

AVG issues have been resolved I gather, though it does sound as though they're not wanting to give so much (many functions) away these days.

Sounds safe to give one or tuther a go.

[Mike-Bracknell]

AVG issues have been resolved I gather, though it does sound as though they're not wanting to give so much (many functions) away these days

They're giving exactly the same feature-set away as they've done for the past umpty-ump years. It's just that they've expanded their feature set for the paid version.

For example, the anti-spyware component used to be a separate download & install (because it was a product from a company that Grisoft bought, and then slowly worked to amalgamate), but now it's included in both the free and paid versions.

Just don't install the IE toolbar

[Keef]

I've been a regular user of ZoneAlarm, till I went Win 7. There wasn't a ZA for that till a few weeks ago.

I downloaded the Beta of ZA for Win 7, but it seemed to have a load of other stuff built in (virus protection as I recall) so I didn't install it. Am I missing anything?

[Mike-Bracknell]

I've been a regular user of ZoneAlarm, till I went Win 7. There wasn't a ZA for that till a few weeks ago.

I downloaded the Beta of ZA for Win 7, but it seemed to have a load of other stuff built in (virus protection as I recall) so I didn't install it. Am I missing anything?

As I said in a thread previously, I would avoid any 3rd party firewall application unless you know 100% what you're doing with Windows and with networking. Even then I would strongly recommend against it.

Basically, a badly-configured firewall is worse from a user perspective than no firewall at all. It can be responsible for terrible performance, applications not working properly, crashes, and above all do this silently with no trigger that you're doing the wrong thing at all.

Just use Windows' built-in firewall and a standalone antivirus (i.e. not an all-in-one) package, and you'll be safe as houses.

[green granite]

Zone alarm is, for me, one of the better firewalls. The software access permissions I find the easiest to change of all the firewall that I've tried.

Keef, you can install the firewall without the rest of the stuff, there's a box to tick during the install procedure to install the anti virus bits. It works well on 7

[Keef]

Thanks, gg.

I've used ZoneAlarm for many years, and installed it for more than a few friends who got "hacked" via the Windows XP (chocolate) firewall. The Win7 one may be better, but I've confidence in ZA from years of use. It's a pain when you first install it, because it asks you about every item that tries to get in or out - but it's a lot better than the alternative.

I just didn't want to mess with the existing virus protection, which is working fine. If I can install ZA without the extras, that's for me.

[Mike-Bracknell]

It's a pain when you first install it, because it asks you about every item that tries to get in or out

This is generally the problem to which I allude. You can be typing along merrily in a document, then suddenly see a window flash up and be dismissed almost instantly. If you didn't see that it was ZoneAlarm asking you whether to block some internal Windows process that it has no knowledge of, or a recently installed program that's decided now's the time to auto-update itself, then you're buggered. Even if you DID see it, you've got to trawl through the rulesets trying to figure out whether a rule was there last time you looked, and whether it's meant to be there, and whether it's doing the right job or not.

...and that's without delving into the jar of worms associated with saying "yes" to unblocking any request that comes your way simply because you're being asked too many questions and can't differentiate right from wrong.

I understand if you want to use it, and you understand the risks associated with it, but I hope you too can understand why I recommend against it?

FYI, the XPSP2 onwards firewalls aren't chocolate, they just don't block outbound-initiated traffic. In this case I'd argue that your computer's already likely to be buggered before the time that the virus/trojan needs to access the internet outbound.

(once again though, it's all in the configuration, and a firewall that needs no configuration is inherently more secure than one that leaves the configuration to the user sat at it, given the range of users it's likely to encounter).

[Keef]

Well, some aspects to that:

1. ZoneAlarm has worked fine for me for several years, and the "alerts" didn't disappear if I was typing when they popped up. They'd wait till I clicked on them. My biggest concern about running the Beta of Win 7 was the absence of Zone Alarm (which I only found out when I tried to install it after loading Win 7).

2. A few years ago, ZA stopped a keylogger that got in (past whichever anti-virus I was using at the time) and wanted to talk to home base in China. ZA blocked it and told me about it. So I may have been infected, but at least my passwords etc weren't sent off. It took a couple of minutes to remove the offender. Had I been using the XP Firewall, I may never have known till my bank account started shrinking.

3. Sadly, ZA Win 7 Beta isn't compatible with something in my Win 7 machine (I know not what). It did all the right things on install, including allowing me to turn off the Anti-Virus bit, but it wouldn't let Thunderbird or Firefox connect to the Internet, it did something odd to my graphics card, and it disabled the connection between my desktop and laptop. Since there's a lot of traffic between desktop and laptop (usually over VPN) that was a killer.

So I've removed it, and gone back to the Win 7 Firewall. All is back in operation again. Oh well.

[green granite]

Sorry to hear that Keef, It's slightly different to the old zone alarm, I don't get many alerts and the user interface has different features on it but it seems to work ok on my M/C.