Posted by on Dec 4, 2009 in General | 2 comments

Here is the crux of the issue:

Antivirus software works.  Antivirus doesn’t work.

No matter what program you have, if you don’t have good, secure habits (and even that is not an absolute), you will get bitten.  And your Antivirus program will not stop it.  And you will have three options:

  1. Clean it yourself
  2. Pay someone to clean it up
  3. Backup the data and wipe the machine

In the past week alone, I’ve had three different calls from three different kids of users, using three different Antivirus “solutions”; all of whom got hijacked.

So, to recap:  You pay $35 (or $45 or $55) per year, and still have to give up your machine for a couple of hours while it gets cleaned up.  Oh, and you may have lost personal data in the meantime.

Even USA Today has figured this out.  Unfortunately there aren’t any good pie charts to go along with the article.

What is the answer?  I’m not sure.  I’m thinking of just running Microsoft Security Essentials (on the theory that it is free, and they know about malware, having created the worst programs in the history of mankind; badda-bing!), with the occasional manual scans by MalwareBytes.

Let’s be careful out there.