StarDestroyer.Net BBS

ok, I just had to format after I recieved an iPod from my parents as an early christmas and birthday present. only problem was that when I installed Itunes from apple, my computer's anti-virus decied that itunes' and my ipod was making my internet security unsafe.

Get rid of McAffee and install Microsoft Security Essentials.

that's what I did, back on friday, and have been rebuilding my computer since than...

Can you join the dots for me on how you went from a false positive from an antivirus program to reinstalling your OS?

The Anti virs wouldn't let me acess the internet AT ALL, and wouldn't let me shut it off temporarily, I tried to rebuild from the image before it went berzerker and it wasn't letting me do that, since the image was stored online...

JLTucker wrote:Get rid of McAffee and install Microsoft Security Essentials.

That, and tell all of your friends and family to get rid of McAffee and the like. MSE is all you or most people need.

I'd recommend against MSE. It is great and all but if you get a virus that infects services.exe, you're up the creek without a paddle as MSE is tied to it. If services.exe is infected for some reason and you try to reinstall MSE, you'll constantly crash the computer when it tries to load MSE.

My father in law's computer got infected and got rid of MSE because of the above instance and I installed AVG instead. I wonder if I had installed AVG first then possibly it could have caught the virus early.

ITT we learn that viruses attack anti virus software???

Luckily MSE (rebranded Windows Defender again) is built into Win8, so all the user has to do is not stop it updating and they'll be fine.

I've had the opposite experience of Enigma: AVG had become a bloated performance drag and I dropped it in favor of Defender (now MSE). That combined with a few addons like noscript and adblock covers all my bases. Norton and McAfee used to be nice light-weight AV programs. Now they cripple machines right out of the box. McAfee has to be the worst though as it requires a username/password in order to get definition updates and it seems to throw a fit if you try and uninstall it while it's bugging you about creating an account. What idiot thought that was a good idea?

Stark wrote:ITT we learn that viruses attack anti virus software???

Luckily MSE (rebranded Windows Defender again) is built into Win8, so all the user has to do is not stop it updating and they'll be fine.

The virus wasn't specifically attacking MSE it attacked services.exe which Windows relies on for a whole bunch of programs including MSE, firewall, updating, etc... Infecting services.exe effectively kills or corrupts all programs relying on it. AVG managed to remove the virus but services.exe remains messed up.

I can only assume that if I and my father in law had AVG instead of MSE, we could've caught the virus before it infected services.exe.

In other words, putting all your eggs in one basket is bad, mmmkay?

EDIT: Fortunately in my case, updating my computer to Win8 fixed everything.

Are you honestly unaware that viruses will target files used by anti virus applications y/n? I don't want to get in the way of your tortuous logic, I just want to understand what brand of crazy you are.

For what it's worth MSE/Defender rates pretty poorly in detection but excellent in repair, apparently. I've never had a virus while I've had MSE, but then I'm not looking at amazingly dodgey porn sites and installing anything with a popup like EVERYONE'S DAD EVER.

I get, it just took me a bit to realize it. I was too focused on services.exe that it took my brain a while to realize the reason why it would be infected. Ain't being learning disabled grand?

The thing is, that I honestly don't know how I got the same damned virus my father in law has. I'm pretty much careful how I surf the web, I avoid unsafe sites and have blocked all popups. I'm careful as to what I download and from where, yet I still got infected. Then again, I'm not the only person using this computer.

My father in law mainly uses Yahoo mail and Ebay\Paypal and doesn't surf other sites (AFAIK) and he got infected. I've cleared off the infections but services remains corrupted so he currently can't update Windows nor does he have a firewall.

Right, and none of that leads to your conclusion 'would have been totally fine with AVG'. It just means you all got a virus and it broke your computer.

Stark wrote:Right, and none of that leads to your conclusion 'would have been totally fine with AVG'. It just means you all got a virus and it broke your computer.

It could have been fine. Who knows, maybe that virus was designed to target MSE only through services.exe. *shrugs*

Okay, before this turns into a pointless argument, I'd like to point out that there is absolutely no reason why you cannot install more than one anti-virus program.

Zaune wrote:Okay, before this turns into a pointless argument, I'd like to point out that there is absolutely no reason why you cannot install more than one anti-virus program.

Having more than one AV's active component running is a really bad idea. My work with later revision of McAfee and Norton is pretty limited outside clicking "uninstall:" can you even disable the active components of these programs? The most I would do is run an AV, then have a malware remover like SpyBot (with add-ons disabled) to back it up with manual scans. More importantly though, use browser plug-ins to catch/prevent infections at the head-end and (as Stark said) avoid dodgy porn sites, rather than rely on programs to help after you've been infected.

If you want to run multiple antivirus programs (almost always a horrible idea outside a few key scenarios), I'd recommend installing Avast as your secondary, as there's a specific option during Avast's install process that disables most of its active shenanigans for that express purpose.