Anti-virus: Seriously serious thread

[stek]

You dont need to go to the excessive expense of apple crap to avoid viruses. Go Linux Mint instead.

When I was at IBM we had to have their Open Client Red Hat install on our laptops, what a total POS that was, ask Scruff, he was almost driven to suicide because of it!

I actually preferred Windows, and that's saying something.

[alphadog]

ESET smart security is pretty good. Pretty cheap too if you manage to buy a registration code from a Chinese ebay rip off

[VectraMan]

Avoiding viruses is a nice side effect of Macs, the OS and build quality is so much better than PCs, and charging a realistic price for their kit means Apple don't install Trojans like Blowfish as part of the bloatware firms load onto their kit to scrape a few more dollars profit out of people...

Yeah yeah and the moon's made of chocolate.

I remember the nightmare I had installing, using and then trying to get rid of iTunes. And it installed a load of other crap too. WTF is Bonjour? (I know unfortunately; I had to install it again the other day to get some software to build).

Is it even possible to get a virus without explicitly downloading and installing something these days? It shouldn't be. You just have to be careful of those sites that try to trick you into downloading something other than the thing you want (Sourceforge for example). It would take me 5 minutes to write something that could delete all your files and if you were stupid enough to download and run it no anti-virus in the world would help you.

[MicrosoftBob]

Yeah yeah and the moon's made of chocolate.

I remember the nightmare I had installing, using and then trying to get rid of iTunes. And it installed a load of other crap too. WTF is Bonjour? (I know unfortunately; I had to install it again the other day to get some software to build).

Is it even possible to get a virus without explicitly downloading and installing something these days? It shouldn't be. You just have to be careful of those sites that try to trick you into downloading something other than the thing you want (Sourceforge for example). It would take me 5 minutes to write something that could delete all your files and if you were stupid enough to download and run it no anti-virus in the world would help you.

Online adverts are often hacked with the linked sites trying to inject zero day viruses, so you could visit a major news site for instance and get hacked

You don't have to do something stupid, you just need to be unlucky once

[Troll]

you may want to point them towards more mainstream sites like xnxx or pornhub

Do you have a list perchance? ( <ahem> all in the name of research of course)

[meridian]

Yeah yeah and the moon's made of chocolate.

I remember the nightmare I had installing, using and then trying to get rid of iTunes. And it installed a load of other crap too. WTF is Bonjour? (I know unfortunately; I had to install it again the other day to get some software to build).

Is it even possible to get a virus without explicitly downloading and installing something these days? It shouldn't be. You just have to be careful of those sites that try to trick you into downloading something other than the thing you want (Sourceforge for example). It would take me 5 minutes to write something that could delete all your files and if you were stupid enough to download and run it no anti-virus in the world would help you.

Those sites that have massive big "Download here" signs that are not actually the download button but lead you to some other software download are the biggest pain. A pox on the web designer that thought these were a good idea.

[VectraMan]

Online adverts are often hacked with the linked sites trying to inject zero day viruses, so you could visit a major news site for instance and get hacked

You don't have to do something stupid, you just need to be unlucky once

If it were that simple you'd be having 50 anti-virus warnings a day. And you don't.

HTML is a text based document format. If there's any way to put anything malicious in it then that's a browser flaw, not an OS flaw, and browsers should be pretty well hardened after all those years of use. Even if it were possible to get the browser to run something malicious as it doesn't run with administrator permissions what it could do is still quite limited.

It seems to me 99.999% of the risk is someone downloading an EXE and saying "yes whatever" when the OS prompts you about whether it's something you know is safe and want to grant administrator permission to. Or that they con you over the phone into installing something and handing over your password. I've seen a couple of those sites that flash scary "virus detected" messages "phone this number immediately"; you can imagine how many non-technical users could fall for that one, mainly because they naively think they're safe as they have anti-virus installed.

[original PM]

Do you have a list perchance? ( <ahem> all in the name of research of course)

I have 'ahem' asked my 'friend' and she says that you should be able to find everything you need on those.....

obviously depends on what you want....

[MicrosoftBob]

If it were that simple you'd be having 50 anti-virus warnings a day. And you don't.

HTML is a text based document format. If there's any way to put anything malicious in it then that's a browser flaw, not an OS flaw, and browsers should be pretty well hardened after all those years of use. Even if it were possible to get the browser to run something malicious as it doesn't run with administrator permissions what it could do is still quite limited.

It seems to me 99.999% of the risk is someone downloading an EXE and saying "yes whatever" when the OS prompts you about whether it's something you know is safe and want to grant administrator permission to. Or that they con you over the phone into installing something and handing over your password. I've seen a couple of those sites that flash scary "virus detected" messages "phone this number immediately"; you can imagine how many non-technical users could fall for that one, mainly because they naively think they're safe as they have anti-virus installed.

Html can include Javascript, from Javascript you can call server side code if you know how to be nasty

[d000hg]

Where's the 'None, I have a Mac' option?

Or just "none, I'm stupid"