Hello everyone

I have a question and every reply would be appreciated. I know it can be each to there own,but in your opinion,what is the Top 3 anti-malware/spyware products (and only top 3) and single anti-virus available,freeware or paid for? (If you have a list for paid for products and for freeware,then you can list both if you wish)
Im just interested (and maybe you are too) in seeing what you all say,especially those with quite a few programmes running,in finding out your top 3!

Thanks

Hello vicmax,
My top three anti-spyware products (that I use):
-> Ad-Aware SE Personal
-> Spybot- Search & Destroy
-> a²

My favourite anti-virus software (once again that I use):
-> AVG Free Edition

I'm sure other's opinions will be different, but these are mine. For more information about free anti-virus and anti-malware products, please go to the following link:
Virus And Malware Resouces

Charles

Vicmax,

I'll be a sellout and say:

Commercial Anti-Spyware Products

Spy Sweeper
Spyware Doctor (I use)
Counter Spy

Freeware Anti-Spyware Products

Ewido
AdAware
SpyBot S&D

Anti Virus

AVG << Effective and Free, however I use Symantec AV Corporate Edition LOL

These 2006 reviews might help you out as well...

The following link is for a 2006 review by TopTenReviews of some of the most popular and effective commercial Anti-Malware products:

Commercial Anti-Spyware Reviews

The following link will take you to a 2006 review, by TopTenReviews, for commercial Anti Virus Products. This will help you get a good idea of what AV products you should be looking to purchase. Remember, there are also great freeware products that will serve you well!

Commercial Anti-Virus Reviews

Here is a link to some freeware replacements to commercial anti-malware products:

Freeware Replacements...

I hope this helps everyone out

I must agree entirely with Harry83 on his top three commercial anti-spyware products:

Paid Anti-Spyware:

1. SpySweeper (My personal favorite)
2. Spyware Doctor (Slightly weaker than SpySweeper in my opinion)
3. Sunbelt's CounterSpy (Some people also like CA's PestPatrol)

Paid Anti-Virus:

1. Kapsersky (My personal favorite, a must have if you're going to pay for AV it's ~$50 per year)
2. NOD32 (Excellent product slightly less powerful than Kaspersky but has a proportional price as well ~$30)
3. Panda AV (or McAfee)

Free Anti-Spyware:

1. Ewido Anti-Malware (or A-Squared)
2. Ad-Aware SE
3. Spybot S&D

Free AV:

1. AVG Free (Personal Favorite)
2. AntiVir (This product within the caliber of AVG if not more comprehensive)
3. Bit Defender 8

Just a note though....TopTenReviews is a review site and we all know how those can be...take it with a "grain of salt" because there is definitely a questionable product or two in those lists...towards the bottom of the rankings though thankfully...

The word "best" opens up a can of worms, but I will tell you what I have used with very great success:

AVGFree
Spybot S&D
Ad-AwareSE
Sygate Personal Firewall
Firefox browser

Depending on whether you follow best practices or not when it comes to computer security and web browsing, these may be more than enough.

Regards,
John

I have to say BitDefender is the best antivirus (at least for me anyway). I would like to say a few words about it. I’ve been using this software since version 7 (or maybe since version 6, I’m not very sure) and I’m perfectly happy with it. It works fine both on my desktop pc (Celeron D 2,97 GHz, 1 GB RAM) and on my Toshiba laptop (1,6 GHz, 1 GB RAM). At some point I had ZoneAlarm installed as a personal firewall but then I realized the firewall in BitDefender 9 is good enough and I stopped using ZoneAlarm (I don’t like having a lot of applications running in background and eating up resources and I don’t like a bunch of icons in my tray bar). The user interface is easy to use and clean. Updates are released hourly I think (which in my opinion is one of the most important features in an antivirus solution) and you can set it to auto-update. I’m not using the anti-spam feature so I can’t give you any details on it. I strongly suggest everyone looking for an antivirus solution to download the trial version and test it out.

My 2 cents...

Joe

My favourites, all freebies, are

ANTIVIRUS Avast
FIREWALL Kerio
ANTISPY SpybotSD with Teatimer enabled
SpywareBlaster
SpywareGuard. Have other layers of protection running as well.

My favorite is a security suite. It has a firewall, antivirus, antimalware, intrusion prevention, parental control, Instant Messaging monitoring, and more. It is the world reknowned

Zone Labs Security Suite.

It's only $56.65 for download and plus you get a free 12-month download option.

--Bots

I totally agree with John there, just that I dont use Spybot and Adaware (I have a router which so far kept me out of trouble). I also use the MVP winhelp2002 Hostfile, which blocks a lot of sites with evil attachments anyway.I use Hostsecure to update it and Hoster to manipulate it (allowing for some google ads).

rgds

Johannes

Thanks to everyone for giving there answers to this one.

So here another,is there anyone out there who has been running free software that has been clean of malware and virus's for over 2 years?

I find it amazing just how good some of the free stuff out there is (a bit like Bleeping Computer in a way ) Is there a way to see how good these freeware versions are compared to there shopside friends?

I guess somtimes, you can get somthing for nothing!

Anyone tried 'superantispyware'? They seem to be pushing it a lot at the moment.

And my preferrred apps, Kaspersky AV & SpySweeper & the freebie Ewido.

The vendors always show a table listing the extra features on the paid versions, you could start there.

hi highlander,

yes i ve used it and had contact with the author of it. It is a very easy to use programme and the author is very quick in responding to questions about his software in the newsgroups, as well as tries to provide a lot of help. The programme is updated regularly and doe clean a lot of the infections present out there. As I have no VM installed currently I am not sure how it performs overall when multiple infections are present, but sofar I can only tell good things bout it.

hth and regards

Johannes

For all the BitDefneder fans out there, check this out: www.downloads32.com/discounts.php
Kaspersky fans should take a look too.

@vicmax: I personally dont think in free software, at least not in the field of "malware". Take Spybot - S&D for instance: donation buttons all over, can you call it free software? What about support? Plus I don't like it period. But this is just my opinion.

And this is from webroot's website: "In February 2005, the company accepted its first outside investment of $108 million" (http://www.webroot.com/company/). Who can really compete with that? Freeware developers must put some food on the table too after all.

my 2 cents...

Actually, you'd be surprised (or I would assume you'd be) at how many of the helpers/experts here at the forum run on free software. A large chunk of the HJT Team, Moderators, and even some Admins here run on free antivirus programs. The two most popular (and powerful in my opinion) are AVG Free (By far the most popular among the HJT Team and such helpers) and Avira's AntiVir (I'm pretty sure I saw an admin who has this program listed as his AV in his profile). It is entirely possible to keep a fully clean machine without paying a cent for security software. Take for example myself. I use the following:

AVG Free Edition
The Multi_AV Tool
Sunbelt Kerio Free Firewall
Ewido Anti-Malware
Spybot S&D
Ad-Aware SE
Windows Defender
A-Squared
Spyware Blaster
Spyware Guard
and the HOSTs blocking software.

Every single program on that list is completely free and in conjunction with each other, keep my computer 100% clean. Now, this depends on your Internet habits. Being the teen that I am, my habits are probably average (if you consider online gaming bad, then my habits are bad), so most people should survive if they utilize the free tools out there and use common sense on the web. In regards to SuperAntiSpyware: I have tried it. Did I like it? No. There are several reasons for this:
1. Its scanner tooks years to scan my relatively small computer size; not to mention all of my other AS programs managed to scan my computer quickly and effectively.
2. Whenever I tried to end SuperAntiSpyware during a scan, my computer would semi-freeze. I'd have to use the taskmanager to end it. After SuperAS was stopped forcefully, my computer would stay in a sluggish, nightmaric state and I'd have to reboot.
3. The monitoring features consumed a lot of my system resources (and I have quite a lot) and slowed my computer to a point where it was more benificial not ot use the program.

All in all, if SuperAS can be made lighter and faster, it would gain potential to compete against Ewido, Ad-Aware SE, and such programs.

Freeware products can be very effective, as others have already stated. Do I think they are as powerful as commercial products? Absolutely not. The trustworthy, high-end commercial products are very powerful. They have great interfaces, are easy to use, have great customer support (for the most part), and offer many features that you don't find in freeware. Do you need all of those extra features, and fancy interfaces to keep a clean machine? Again, no. The algorithms freeware products are using are getting the job done. They might not look as "cool" but in conjunction with each other they are very effective. Furthermore, if you can't get good support on such products then there are always helpeful sites out there like Bleeping Computer.

The millions of dollars that commercial vendors have to spend is mostly put into advertising, packaging, websites, pretty interfaces, extra gizmos and fairly useless(sometimes useful) extra features...It'd be nice if they spent $100 million on a crack programming team who could develop the ultimate scanning/detection/removal algorithms but unfortunately they spend a comparatively small sum on actual product develpment.

For anti-virus,I'll go with KAV 6.0.0.300.

The new KAV 6 is very light on resources compare to KAV 5 and has superb detection rates.

Unless you count a couple of tracking cookies that slipped by, my computer has been malware free for well over two years, and this with using freeware.
Regards,
John

Prevx1 is my antivirus; Prevx1 is my primary antispyware; Prevx1 is my CIPs; although I have as backups ewido antimalware, JPEGScan, RootkitRevealer, Spybot - Search & Destroy, SpywareBlaster, Trojan Remover, Wormguard, Autoruns, Port Explorer, Ad-Aware, ProcessExplorerNT. and Windows Worms Doors Cleaner. My firewall is Comodo (free). All these behind BEFSX41 Linksys router. I uninstalled ZoneAlarm Internet Security because ZoneLabs manufactured a spurious incompatibility with Prevx1. I am off suites. I see that most of you chose your own suite by selecting what you believe are the best standalone programs. Note that I only have three, counting the firewall, true realtime apps. I am open to suggestions for a good spamfilter, especially if free. Since I have a lot of time left on my ZAISS license, I am trying to swap it for a license for IMsecure from ZoneLabs. I'll do a search here for spamfilter suggestions.

My all time favorite and usual suggestion Bluefrog AntiSpam is dead now, so on to plan B. For Anti-Spam that is free and rather durable and sturdy I choose A-Squared Anti-Spam Free

CWShredder
ewido anti-spyware *
F-Secure Blacklight Beta
Gibson Research

DCOMbobulator
IDServe
MouseTrap
Shoot The Messenger
Socket Lock
Socket To Me
UnPlug n'Pray
XPdite

JPEGScan
Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal
McAfee AVERT Stinger
McAfee AVERT Stinger for W32-Polip
Password Safe
PGP *
Port Explorer *
Prevx1 *
RootkitRevealer
Spybot Search & Destroy
SpywareBlaster *
Trojan Remover *
Wormguard *
ZoneAlarm Pro *
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
I don't need a standalone antispam with Thunderbird as email client. I had used Outlook Express because I have PGP, But PGP supports Thunderbird now. Most of the programs are free; * designates the commercial. SpywareBlaster is free, but if you wish the autoupdate it is about ten bucks a year. I choose for effectiveness and fit into my systems. The backbone of this array is Prevx1, ZoneAlarm, and the Mozillas; the others are backup, the secondline. Thank you for recommendation. I have use A-squared in the past, though not the spamfilter. It is probably good.

In my opinion, my favorite programs would consist of:

AntiVirus Programs
For antivirus protection, I would either pick AVG Antivirus, which is free and what I normally use, or Nod32, which is not free.

AntiSpyware Programs
For protection against adware I use Lavasoft Adaware Personal, along with Spybot Search & Destroy and to get immunized from potential spyware threats, I use Spywareblaster. All of these programs are free.

Anyway... that's about it for me with protection. Well, I have McAfee SiteAdvisor installed into my Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 (which is my main browser, I'm not a huge fan of Firefox myself... I use it sometimes). It is available for Firefox too, and it shows whether the site you are current visiting is a phising site, has adware downloads, popups or is safe. Useful when you have you guard down a bit, and might accidently go to a phising bank or eBay site. It's completely free too.

Hi ... I'm curious to know as why you feel NOD 32 is slightly less powerful than Kaspersky ?

Well, I find that Kaspersky has a broader range of detection and more powerful ways of detection than NOD32. In one case, one of my friends had NOD32 fully updated and everything but a malware nasty kept hitting him, so I used the Kaspersky module in the Multi_AV tool (in short it's basically a Kaspersky scanner) and it managed to detect the malware; although it couldn't remove it because it "wasn't a virus", but the manual removal wasn't too bad. But again, NOD32 is a wonderful AV product and I wouldn't switch to Kaspersky (which by the way has a higher price as mentioned) just because of a personal experience I have had (plus as mentioned the program wasn't a virus/worm as my friend and I had thought, so an anti-spyware program or program of such sort would probably have detected and removed the threat).

No Offence Elendil just because NOD32 didn't catch what Kaspersky did doesn't mean its slightly less powerful because I have seen were Kaspersky didn't catch what NOD 32 did , Also Kaspersky use more resources then NOD 32 or aleast the version I was using back then , There not one anti-virus program out there that is 100% and there will probably never be either , Though I will say that NOD 32 and Kaspersky to my opinion are probably the 2 best anti-virus programs out there and because of the price different i did end up sticking with nod 32

No offence has been taken. My ordering list (as was stated) was determined based on my opinions and experiences. In my experiences, Kaspersky has always been number 1 (at least when I knew a thing or two about security and realized that it even existed) and hasn't missed a single virus that other programs detect. I was never implying that Kaspersky detects everything and that it definately detects everything NOD32 does and more. Your reasoning for choosing NOD32 is typical: Excellent quality & low costs (doesn't one $30 license allow you to use NOD32 on 4 computers or something along those lines?).

i dont kno any good spywarees but i reccomend NOD32



lol in ur dreams m8 its up to 40 bucks now and its like 90bucks for a year for 4 users..prices shot

and so u guys reccomend getting kaspersky

You know if it wasn't for a few things ? I probably would of stay using K , Like the resource it use's and the false positive , scanning time is another thing , lastly the price

http://www.eset.com/purchase/index.php

moomoo I don't know where you get $40 ? Unless you are new user to the product but, renewals are $27 , That a great price for an excellent product

BTW the way I see it ? Use NOD32 as your anti-virus , use Kaspersky and bitdenfer online scanners which is free , you can't go wrong , now can you ?

...

heh? and yea ok and i aint talking bout renewals i meant actaully buying the thing lawl

Okay then but don't you think once you do that ? That the price just to renew is much better then Kaspersky , Its almost half the cost for what Kaspersky wants and for each renewal it entitles you to latest versions as well , Kaspersky doesn't do that ...

I have no idea about the false positives you're talking about; however, the "resource hog and infinately long scaning time" I believe, refers to the old Kaspersky 5.0. From what I've heard, the new version is much more powerful, fast, and efficient. The price will be the same for a great product (but you're right NOD32 has a lower price, however just look at Norton users. They can't complain or at least from what my friend tells me, $50 is much less than $70).

Hi
My favorites are SPYBOT S & D, ADAWARE, and BAZOOKA for best spyware stoppers
and AVAST home edition for the best Antivirus software.

Are you kidding me ? look at Norton users can't complain , Every since Peter Norton sold it to Symantec , Symantec made it go into the toilet , I don't even want to go there lol Norton

Mod Edit: close BBCode tag. ~ Animal

I'm not saying these are the best. They are what I use. Some are "paid" and some are "free".
1. Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security 2006.
2. Webroot Spysweeper
3. Spybot Search and Destroy
4. Adaware
5. A squared
6. Yahoo Anti-Spy
7. Ccleaner
I used Norton's Systemworks for 2 or 3 years and switched to PC-cillin in February '06. PC-cillin seems to do a good job. The spyware isn't that great but I use Spysweeper for my major spyware protection. The firewall has had some below average reviews but I use it with the hardware firewall in my 2Wire Modem and it passes the Stygate and Gibson tests repeatedly.

After reading a post about Yahoo Anti-Spy I have removed it.

As far as my preferences for anti-malware goes, I like the following:

AVG AntiVirus 7.5 Free Edition
Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition (Contrary to a lot of Symantec product views I have, I really like this one.)
Ad-Aware

and for additional protection, I have some other tools I use, such as:

Comodo Firewall Pro 3
McAfee Site Advisor

May I ask you and advice? Since a while my AVG 7.5 doesn't install the resident shield every other PC start. Have you experienced such trouble and how did you fix it? Many thanks and greetings

Don't be too paranoid...

Example: I use SUPERAntispyware & MalwareBytes Anti-Malware on-demand, I scan fortnightly or monthly. I then have COMODO Firewall Pro 3 & No Anti-Virus (Because I believe there is only a limited ways infection), I don't do P2P or download any unknown/untrusted site. I also use Firefox 3. That's it for me.

However, You will still need an AV in most circumstances, especially when you do have E-mail, you do use P2P (Limewire, Utorrent, etc) and download/install/browse of risky web sites. The ultimate protection IMO is common sense and layered security:

Prevention (Eg: Comodo Firewall Pro 3 Defense+/Firewall which does not rely on signatures, uses behavior heuristics and other methods) Defense+ actually protections over 60% unknown malware! Something traditional AV's can't do)
Detection (You're Anti-Virus)
Cure (Back up detection technologies like SAS & MBAM), Maybe Recovery software, etc.

People will have different opinions, this is mine. So "relying on the best Anti-Virus & Anti-Malware product", and ONLY those things isn't good- Because you are just relying on detection, You also need prevention & cure! the 3 steps.

Prevention should be your first line of Defense! You're DETECTION Antivirus (Avast!, Avira, NOD32) & PREVENTION (Comodo Firewall Pro 3 with Defense+) Will work great together. Because your AV uses signatures & CFP 3 doesn't!

Dear friend,

Thanks a lot. I have enjoyed your advice not to be paranoid. In some subtle way I am. But the real word is "sensitive" (I am psychiatrist since 44 years ago [not psyhcoanalist, thanks god]). Currently I have downloaded recently issued Avira that I feel as excellent. I will try the rest. Many, many thanks and friendly greetings.