Internet Protection

[don]

My virus protection (racket) is about to expire. Before renewing what are the 'tulipers recommendations on run-of-the-mill vendors.

[jpetr48]

Re: Internet Protection

Get a Mac based operating system.

from Apple web site which now having a Mac and Pc for number of years I can confirm.

Is a Mac safe from PC viruses?
Yes. The OS X operating system isn’t susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. And although no computer connected to the Internet is completely immune to all viruses and spyware, OS X has built-in defenses designed with your safety in mind. The Mac web browser, Safari, alerts you whenever you’re downloading an application — even if it’s disguised as a picture or movie file. And Apple continually makes free security updates available for Mac owners. You can even have them download automatically.


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[don]

Re: Internet Protection

Get a Mac based operating system.

from Apple web site which now having a Mac and Pc for number of years I can confirm.

Is a Mac safe from PC viruses?
Yes. The OS X operating system isn’t susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. And although no computer connected to the Internet is completely immune to all viruses and spyware, OS X has built-in defenses designed with your safety in mind. The Mac web browser, Safari, alerts you whenever you’re downloading an application — even if it’s disguised as a picture or movie file. And Apple continually makes free security updates available for Mac owners. You can even have them download automatically.


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I've had a Mac for years for all my writing, photography, etc. It has never been online, the poor-man's ultimate protection. I use a cheap Dell for internet and would change over to another Mac except for one program I use in my boxing writing. It is MS only.

[doom&gloom]

Re: Internet Protection

Someone here once put up Ghostery, and I use that, but it is not a virus protection program.

And even if you do get one (I use the MS freebie thing), there is no guarantee you will not be on the vanguard of some virus they have no yet created a stop or fix to deal with...

Best bet is never open emails from anyone you do not know, never visit strange websites, and use the MS freebie deal with Ghostery and maybe an added pop-up program. I am not sure paying Norton or McAfee is worth the money myself.

[c1ue]

Re: Internet Protection

The meme that Macs are immune to viruses is marketing bull puckey.

The primary reason Macs have had less viruses is much more prosaic: smaller install base and higher hardware cost. In the past, the 16 year old virus writer typically didn't have access to Macs.

Unfortunately between the emulators (OSX on PCs), the iPhone, the iPad, and the increase in all things Mac related, the mostly harmless hype is now actively harmful and wrong.

http://www.securemac.com/

[shiny!]

Re: Internet Protection

Use Linux. Free and secure. There are several versions which are configured nicely for the desktop or laptop if that's your preference. Salix OS, PCLinuxOS and Mageia are all stable and have lots of apps in their repositories. They each have live-CD's which load into memory so you can run them without installing them on your harddrive. This allows you to make sure they work with your hardware before installing them. The live-CDs run a little slow, but are fast once installed. The firewall in Mageia is set up to be very secure right out of the box. No virus protection needed.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Internet Protection

I've had a Mac for years for all my writing, photography, etc. It has never been online, the poor-man's ultimate protection. I use a cheap Dell for internet and would change over to another Mac except for one program I use in my boxing writing. It is MS only.

Depending on how heavy on resources the boxing writing app is, you can probably make it go on Linux with Wine or on Mac with Winebottler.

[stetts]

Re: Internet Protection

Don,
After substantial work to get my Dell with MS XP computer all cleaned, I simply downloaded the Microsoft Security Essentials for firewall and antivirus (it's on automatic update) and use FireFox as my browser. That's it. It's worked for a year so far, no infections, no fuss, it just works.
Hope this helps. Stetts

[lektrode]

Re: Internet Protection

short of buying a mac, which i havent quite got to that point (yet, but its getting time to buy another machine, the current HP/xp unit going on 6years, with _flawless_ performance, cept for needing a new batt a couple years back) - and not sure if i feel like 'mastering' a new opsys, nor paying double and then some for new hardware...

(ok windy, make a point and shut up, would ya....)

my strategy has (seemingly) worked quite well for at least 10years now (since it was appx 12years back that eye noticed that windaz was being hijacked/zombied by the script-kiddies and was sending junkmail out the backdoor) and goes something like this:

1 - keep the add'l installed software to a minimum and stay away from the 'free download' apps whenever practical
2 - do not use 'internet excuse' (explorer) unless the site in question wont run on anything but
3 - do not use 'outhouse distress' (outlook, or whatevah they call it lately)

4 - quite simply, do not use anything from microsquish on the internet (apologies to the MS crew, but IMHO, they deciding to 'own' the internet, crushing netscape in the process, was The Worst Thing that ever happened online - altho i'm satisfied enuf with windaz itself and do think MS 'democratized' the personal computing industry and allowed lots of people an easier way into/onto the digital world - least easier than trying to master unix etc - which i sorta/kinda tried myself - but thats a whole nutha story)

5 - do not use/install ms office, if you can avoid it = too much of a resource hog -
open office works just fine (most of time, anyway)

6 - stop/disable windaz from 'updating' itself automatically - when the machine was new, i ran all the updates for xp-sp2 the first few months and then stopped cold - since most of it was due to all the bugs that come with all the above and since i dont use any of them, why would it need continuous 'updating'? - that and i think this is the most aggregiously conspiratorial aspect of the ole 'win-tel conspiracy' - installing all the updates and the updates to the updates and the updated updates and eventually one gets so far out on that limb, that the machine finally cant be updated anymore and quits running the stuff that ran fine fer years, until that last update...

7 - i use firefox and the 'no script' addon - this prevents any java/scripted stuff from launching until you know what it is and why its launching = my default setting and i only enable scripts when some aspect of an unfamiliar site isnt visible and even then i simply passby a lot of sites that insist that every bleeding-edge bell n whistle some egomaniac web designer thot was coool and must be enabled - to even look at the opening/index page?? (how to lose eyeballs, or mine anyway)

8 - i'm still using eudora4.0 for email and it still works as good as the day i bought it in 1998 - course i'm the type that thinks email should be ascii text and if ya want to look at perty pictures, thats what a web browser is for, but hey! to each his own... the single best thing about ole eudora is that she has a setting for 'leave messages large than x-bytes' on the server and only downloads the header and basic info like: from who, what, howbig so you can decide _before_ download, whether you even want to bother - why is this a good thing? - well for one, most email-attached viruses are larger than a certain size (50k or so) and if you set the 'hold at server' function to smaller than that - which allows most typical email xmits thru just fine (cept them photos yer kinkier pals keep sending over) - one completely eliminates the likelyhood of downloading anything funky - and if ya dont download it, it cant mess with you... course this also requires one to have REAL email service (SMTP), not some cloud-based thing, where all your stuff is resident on some 3rd-party site - and well... ya gotta pay for that

9 - i wouldnt even think of connecting a 'puta to the net, NOT EVER, without zonealarm
and even then, i would go to grc.com and run his 'shields up' app and MAKE CERTAIN that your setup is tight.

10 - i'm a fan of 'nod32' antivirus - seems to nail just about everything, which isnt often/if ever, that manages to get past all the above

and well... thats my recipe - course now that i've just spelled all this out, i'm sure there'll be somebody who'll just hafta try and crak my setup - but i'm hoping we're amongst friends here on the 'tulip - right???

[aaron]

Re: Internet Protection

Get the microsoft security essentials. It is excellent, complete, and free.
Get AVG free. Antivirus is only about 70% effective. With two, you can be 90% covered.
Use them both, unless your computer is old. If the computer is old, then just use the Microsoft one.
You also should have SuperAntiSpyware.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/w...tials-download

http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage

http://www.superantispyware.com/


The last one has a terrible name. It is excellent software, however.

MACs are for play, not work. They are not compatible with a darned thing. They are very nice toys, in my opinion. But, people sure love 'em.

[don]

Re: Internet Protection

Thanks guys, lots of good advice. Here's something related to the quest . ..

Outmaneuvered at Their Own Game, Antivirus Makers Struggle to Adapt

By NICOLE PERLROTH

SAN FRANCISCO — The antivirus industry has a dirty little secret: its products are often not very good at stopping viruses.

Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security.

“The bad guys are always trying to be a step ahead,” said Matthew D. Howard, a venture capitalist at Norwest Venture Partners who previously set up the security strategy at Cisco Systems. “And it doesn’t take a lot to be a step ahead.”

Computer viruses used to be the domain of digital mischief makers. But in the mid-2000s, when criminals discovered that malicious software could be profitable, the number of new viruses began to grow exponentially.

In 2000, there were fewer than a million new strains of malware, most of them the work of amateurs. By 2010, there were 49 million new strains, according to AV-Test, a German research institute that tests antivirus products.

The antivirus industry has grown as well, but experts say it is falling behind. By the time its products are able to block new viruses, it is often too late. The bad guys have already had their fun, siphoning out a company’s trade secrets, erasing data or emptying a consumer’s bank account.

A new study by Imperva, a data security firm in Redwood City, Calif., and students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is the latest confirmation of this. Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technology officer, and a group of researchers collected and analyzed 82 new computer viruses and put them up against more than 40 antivirus products, made by top companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab. They found that the initial detection rate was less than 5 percent.

On average, it took almost a month for antivirus products to update their detection mechanisms and spot the new viruses. And two of the products with the best detection rates — Avast and Emsisoft — are available free; users are encouraged to pay for additional features. This despite the fact that consumers and businesses spent a combined $7.4 billion on antivirus software last year — nearly half of the $17.7 billion spent on security software in 2011, according to Gartner.

“Existing methodologies we’ve been protecting ourselves with have lost their efficacy,” said Ted Schlein, a security-focused investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “This study is just another indicator of that. But the whole concept of detecting what is bad is a broken concept.”

Part of the problem is that antivirus products are inherently reactive. Just as medical researchers have to study a virus before they can create a vaccine, antivirus makers must capture a computer virus, take it apart and identify its “signature” — unique signs in its code — before they can write a program that removes it.

That process can take as little as a few hours or as long as several years. In May, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered Flame, a complex piece of malware that had been stealing data from computers for an estimated five years.

Mikko H. Hypponen, chief researcher at F-Secure, called Flame “a spectacular failure” for the antivirus industry. “We really should have been able to do better,” he wrote in an essay for Wired.com after Flame’s discovery. “But we didn’t. We were out of our league in our own game.”

Symantec and McAfee, which built their businesses on antivirus products, have begun to acknowledge their limitations and to try new approaches. The word “antivirus” does not appear once on their home pages. Symantec rebranded its popular antivirus packages: its consumer product is now called Norton Internet Security, and its corporate offering is now Symantec Endpoint Protection.

“Nobody is saying antivirus is enough,” said Kevin Haley, Symantec’s director of security response. Mr. Haley said Symantec’s antivirus products included a handful of new technologies, like behavior-based blocking, which looks at some 30 characteristics of a file, including when it was created and where else it has been installed, before allowing it to run. “In over two-thirds of cases, malware is detected by one of these other technologies,” he said.

Imperva, which sponsored the antivirus study, has a horse in this race. Its Web application and data security software are part of a wave of products that look at security in a new way. Instead of simply blocking what is bad, as antivirus programs and perimeter firewalls are designed to do, Imperva monitors access to servers, databases and files for suspicious activity.

The day companies unplug their antivirus software is still far off, but entrepreneurs and investors are betting that the old tools will become relics.

“The game has changed from the attacker’s standpoint,” said Phil Hochmuth, a Web security analyst at the research firm International Data Corporation. “The traditional signature-based method of detecting malware is not keeping up.”

Investors are backing a new crop of start-ups that turn the whole notion of security on its head. If it is no longer possible to block everything that is bad, the thinking goes, then the security companies of the future will be the ones whose software can spot unusual behavior and clean up systems once they have been breached.

The hottest security start-ups today are companies like Bit9, Bromium, FireEye and Seculert that monitor Internet traffic, and companies like Mandiant and CrowdStrike that have expertise in cleaning up after an attack.

Bit9, which received more than $70 million in financing from top venture firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, uses an approach known as whitelisting, allowing only traffic that the system knows is innocuous.

McAfee acquired Solidcore, a whitelisting start-up, in 2009, and Symantec’s products now include its Insight technology, which is similar in that it does not let any unknown files run on a machine.

McAfee’s former chief executive, David G. DeWalt, was rumored to be a contender for the top job at Intel, which acquired McAfee in 2010. Instead, he joined FireEye, a start-up with a system that isolates a company’s applications in virtual containers, then looks for suspicious activity in a sort of digital petri dish before deciding whether to let traffic through.

The company has received more than $35 million in financing from Norwest, Sequoia Capital and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, among others.

Seculert, an Israeli start-up, approaches the problem somewhat differently. It looks at where threats are coming from — the command and control centers used to coordinate attacks — to give governments and businesses an early warning system.
As the number of prominent online attacks rises, analysts and venture capitalists are betting that corporate spending patterns will change.

“Technologies that once were only used by very sensitive industries like finance are moving into the mainstream,” Mr. Hochmuth said. “Very soon, if you are not running these technologies and you’re a security professional, your colleagues and counterparts will start to look at you funny.”

Companies have started working from the assumption that they will be hacked, Mr. Hochmuth said, and that when they are, they will need top-notch cleanup crews.

Mandiant, which specializes in data forensics and responding to breaches, has received $70 million from Kleiner Perkins and One Equity Partners, JPMorgan Chase’s private investment arm.

Two McAfee executives, George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, left to start CrowdStrike, a start-up that offers a similar forensics service. Less than a year later, they have already raised $26 million from Warburg Pincus.

If and when antivirus makers are able to fortify desktop computers, chances are the criminals will have already moved on to smartphones.

In October, the F.B.I. warned that a number of malicious apps were compromising Android devices. And in July, Kaspersky Lab discovered the first malicious app in Apple’s app store. The Defense Department has called for companies and universities to find ways to protect mobile devices from malware. McAfee, Symantec and others are working on solutions, and Lookout, a start-up whose products scan apps for malware and viruses, recently raised funding that valued it at $1 billion.

“The bad guys are getting worse,” Mr. Howard of Norwest said. “Antivirus helps filter down the problem, but the next big security company will be the one that offers a comprehensive solution.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/te...gewanted=print

[FrankL]

Re: Internet Protection

Some tips regardless of OS used:
- don't install Oracle Java unless you have absolute need for it. Even then, disable the java plugins for all internet browsers except the one browser you need to access the page which requires java (keep this access restricted to a separate browser that is only used for accessing this java-enabled resource).
- disable the PDF plugin for Adobe Reader in all your browsers (might be automatically re-enabled after each update to Adobe Reader)
- disable Adobe Flash in all browsers except Google Chrome, where it runs in a sandbox which might make it slightly harder to get infected by an exploit in Adobe Flash.
- as browser, use Google Chrome for flash enabled pages, or Opera with 'plug ins enabled on demand'. Why? Google Chrome has the most secure protection, Opera has a very small install base; both serve to 'protect', although Chrome is the preferred option because Opera has had far more security holes in the past.

Like c1ue says, Mac being more secure is a myth, and the small install base is the actual cause in difference. There are plenty security experts that have explained that security measures in place on modern Microsoft operating systems (e.g. Windows 7) are superior to the ones in place in Apple OSX. What helps on iOS devices is Apple's very strict policy in which apps it allows onto the AppStore. Android suffers from far bigger problems due to Google's loose policies.

[shiny!]

Re: Internet Protection

This is very helpful, FrankL. Thank you!

Thanks to everybody for their security tips.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Internet Protection

Hi Don,

I see that no one really answered your question, so I will take a stab at it.

If you use Windows and pay for anti-virus programs, than you're crazy.

My Suggestion: Use avast! - It's free - it's highly rated - it's extremely easy to use - my computers never come down with viruses.

http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download

And if you're the type that wants to see ratings of anti-virus programs? Here: http://www.av-test.org/index.php?L=1 That outfit tests the programs on a monthly basis.

Sure Linux is usable and I took a good long look at Ubuntu, but that's not what Don asked about. And the Mac people still squawking about "no viruses" was hilarious as well.

[charliebrown]

Re: Internet Protection

I use avast, and microsoft security essential. avast i think is doing a good job, but then again I dont go to many unknown sites, and I don't stick unknown flash drives into my computer. microsoft security essentials was doing a good job, but the periodic updates are really big. I only have 3G internet which I pay for the MB for downloads. Every month mse, would download 30-50MB which cost me 1.20 - 2.00. Avast updates are much smaller.

I also never download stuff except from trusted vendors, and always browse as a limited user. When the pop-up says you need to update flash, or reader etc,
I always exit the session and go to adobe and initiate the download myself. I was once burned this way, the link to update something was really a link to a virus.
I am running firefox, and use private browsing which does not save cookies. I have the add block plugin installed.

I would switch to linux except i can't run tax software. Maybe I should try to run tax-act under wine, then I could free myself from mr. softie.