Avira - equally as poor detection as the competition



  • I had to rebuild a windows XP machine for support of a legacy product.
    Since it is a new install I thought I should put on some free anti-virus and had a quick look at Avira and Avast:

    Loading up Avira website in IE 11 presents this little infographic:

    Avira - equally as poor detection as the other free competition

    I guess there is some script nonsense issue, but why have script for something that could just be a static graphic?



  • Could not recommend Avast. Seen too many things that... leave me questioning their ability as a security vendor.



  • I haven't seen any antivirus capable of stopping anything in several years now. Judging by how often I have to clean crap off friends' and family members' PC's, all of them are overpriced placebos now.



  • @Helix said:


    Maybe the graph is color-coded...


  • FoxDev

    @mott555 said:

    I haven't seen any antivirus capable of stopping anything in several years now. Judging by how often I have to clean crap off friends' and family members' PC's, all of them are overpriced placebos now.

    That's because AVs have become so good, the traditional virus is all but extinct. Nowadays, it's far more profitable (and a helluvafuck easier) to trick users into giving up personal info. Or to trick them into downloading an otherwise benign keylogger/encryptor and stealing details/holding files ransom.


  • kills Dumbledore

    I stick with MSE, and occasionally scan with Malwarebytes. Haven't had any problems so far.


  • FoxDev

    @Jaloopa said:

    I stick with MSE, and occasionally scan with Malwarebytes. Haven't had any problems so far.

    MSE or Windows Defender (which is what MSE got renamed to for windows 8) works gloriously for me. montly scan with malwarebytes just to be sure and my NAS does a full scan every 4 days with ClamAV.

    never had any issues, and the one time clamAV found a virus was in some backup files from ages ago when i was still using Avast and havent touched in about 6 years. (othre than finding the backup HDD and pluggging into the NAS to copy to the RAID array.



  • I guess I have Windows Defender installed.

    Most AV's I've tried just tell me my DOS games directory is a virus. No, Dark Forces is not a virus! Stop flagging it! And back in the day AVG used to constantly delete the Supreme Commander executable without warning or confirmation, that made for some very frustrating LAN parties.


  • kills Dumbledore

    There's a lot of FUD that MS aren't supporting MSE/WD, or that it's intentionally not as good as the commercial AV products to avoid antitrust issues, but it's far less annoying than Avast/Avira/AVG and combined with mainly running under a non admin account with UAC on, my system runs absolutely fine.



  • Honestly AdBlock seems to be the single most effective anti-virus in my experience.


  • FoxDev

    @mott555 said:

    Honestly AdBlock seems to be the single most effective anti-virus in my experience.

    add Flashblock and that's a true QFT


  • Fake News

    I always throw the NoScript and RequestPolicy Firefox plugins on top, 100%* guaranteed to break every site you visit.

    * Pedantic disclaimer: you can obviously white-list scripts for frequent sites just to get those working, in which case you can still get some drive-by thing.


  • FoxDev

    @Jaloopa said:

    There's a lot of FUD that MS aren't supporting MSE/WD

    They're doing a good job of keeping the definitions up to date. And let's be honest, short of a few bug fixes, there's nothing else MS need to do 😄
    @Jaloopa said:
    or that it's intentionally not as good as the commercial AV products to avoid antitrust issues

    Being worse is no guarantee; see Internet Explorer. The reason MS haven't had an anti-trust suit slapped on them over MSE/WD/whatever-the-fuck-they're-calling-it-this-hour is because they aren't using the dominance of Windows to force you to use it. If you wish to use something else, you can tell MSE to fuck off, and, well, it fucks off.



  • I like Avast, and they don't slow down your computer like many others do, but they're getting worse and worse. They really don't want people using the free version. But, you can still set the language to pirate, so it will always be my choice.



  • I would tell you what I know but that would be unethical.

    Let's just say... they got part of their website hacked earlier this year. I know what happened because I am part of the team that investigated. I was shocked with what I found.



  • I may not even have it installed on my machines right now. I haven't seen an 'Ahoy matey, yer blacklist of dangerous sea dogs is safely aboard.' recently. Either they made it less annoying, I didn't install it this time, or I uninstalled it.


  • FoxDev

    well you can't tell us what you found... sure get that...

    But can you tell us this:

    On a scale of 0 to FLEE! RUN WHILE YOU STILL HAVE LEGS! how bad was it?



  • I moved my family off Avast that day. I lost all faith in their competence.

    I mean, I'd cut them some slack for 'they specialise in Windows and different styles of code' but I'd argue some stuff they do understand would be relevant.

    The public statement made: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=523494.0

    I am one of the people who saw the gory details. It's worse than that statement implies.


  • FoxDev

    hmm..... "flee" got it.

    thanks!



  • Yes, you already posted your story about them using a very old version. Didn't they also lie about it?



  • @chubertdev said:

    Yes, you already posted your story about them using a very old version. Didn't they also lie about it?

    They were using version x.y.z-1, claiming that they didn't install current version x.y.z because the updates were all minor (which they were, nothing security related in x.y.z) and then accused us of lying about fixing a remote code exploit in version x.y.z (which considering that I was the one who prepared x.y.z, I took with a lot less grace than I should)

    And you can see the public statement for yourself as to what happened.


  • FoxDev

    @Arantor said:

    which considering that I was the one who prepared x.y.z, I took with a lot less grace than I should

    I've been told I have all the subtlty of a thermnuclear detonator when i'm honked off. I can assume the same was true of you? ;-)



  • I really do not appreciate of being accused of lying.

    Though it seems my comments at the time were more tame than I remember them being.


  • FoxDev

    some sense of self preservation.... good!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Arantor said:

    I really do not appreciate of being accused of lying.

    I totally understand that. When someone accuses me in that sort of way, I get rather irritated. But…

    @Arantor said:

    Though it seems my comments at the time were more tame than I remember them being.

    When I'm angry, I try to leave replying until after I've slept on it. See whether I really want to say things I might regret or not. It's saved my bacon a few times, as I've realised that I mostly don't care very much about the opinion of some random stupid blowhard on the 'net. Once you can recite the mantra “I care not for the opinions of mouthy idiots” without your blood pressure rising, you're OK to think about replying.

    OTOH, I'm more often laughing internally at them. I've had third parties tell me that what the jerk was saying was a formally actionable piece of libel when it was all I could do to not reply with some variant of the willywonkatellmemore image meme. How can I possibly be offended when I'm splitting my sides?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    When I'm angry, I try to leave replying until after I've slept on it.

    Fucking slacker.



  • @dkf said:

    I've had third parties tell me that what the jerk was saying was a formally actionable piece of libel when it was all I could do to not reply with some variant of the willywonkatellmemore image meme. How can I possibly be offended when I'm splitting my sides?

    For the UK's insane definitiion of libel, certainly! I think you get the notions behind 1A better than most folks over on this side of the pond do, though...


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