best antivirus and firewall software

[onearmedscissor]

what is the best antivirus and the best firewall software? i don't care what the price is.

 

[Ice Czar]

use NOD32, NAT Hardware Firewall, and Kerio Personal Firewall 2
and I like the monitoring features in Port Explorer

but there are lots of firewall and ID platforms out there

 

[xdviper]

i am using norton personal firewall 2002. it still works like a charm. i didnt test or install 2004 or 2003 so i dont know how they are,. but go with the norton firewalls.

 

[Bio Hazord]

Kaspersky or Nod32 and then there is the all migthy search buttons . For a firewall a nice NAT will do.

Kerio Personal Firewall 2

Why 2 and not 4 just wondering?

 

[vinnie]

Why 2 and not 4 just wondering?

2 is lean and effecient. 4 is Fisher-Price kiddie interface, more substantial memory footprint and has a whole bunch of features that dissapear at the end of the first month and aren't overly useful to start with. Plus it hard blocks ICS at the end of the month too, which is nasty.

 

[tazdevl]

Kaspersky or Nod32 and then there is the all migthy search buttons . For a firewall a nice NAT will do.


Why 2 and not 4 just wondering?

You still need something to control outgoing connections. NAT doesn't help much with that or whether or not an app dll has been modified.

Kerio 4 is still buggy.

AVs, based on proven threat detection (not just viruses)
Kaspersky
McAfee
NOD32 (LOL Ice I can't wait to hear you bitch when a non-viral threat makes it by)

Firewall:
Plenty out there, all depends on if you want privacy, ad blocking and how much time you want to spend interacting with it. Kero 2, Outpost Pro, ZoneAlarm (5 is still buggy but 4.5 is decent), LooknStop.

 

[Ice Czar]

NOD32 (LOL Ice I can't wait to hear you bitch when a non-viral threat makes it by)

Use TDS-3, WormGuard and Spyblocker (an ancient version) and a bunch of other freeware like RegProt, ScriptDefender ect.
only thing to make it by in the last 3 years was a search hijacker, and that was because I failed to update the OS
since the Hotfix was buggy in some configs of W2K, I immediately knew it when my registry protector went off and manualy removerd it with the help of HijackThis

then I went ahead with the hotfix and borked my install (1 of 4)
then I compounded the error trying to fix it (before the exact problem was documanted and a fix posted) and I killed it

took me 30 minutes to reconfig a different computer as the browser box
and start salvage operations on the dead OS for all data that wasnt in the Ghost Image or backed up elsewhere (which was actually quite alot since I hadnt done an image recently and keep that box isolated, mostly favorites, docs, PDFs, images from the net and freeware, some user settings and tweak documantation)

Pilot Error strikes again

 

[tazdevl]

FYI there's a internal beta floating around of NOD that addresses its shortcomings. I haven't played around with it, but it seems like they might be on the right track based on talking to some folks I know that are playing around with it. Problem is, no one knows when it's going to be released, so it is something of an empty promise.

 

[BillLeeLee]

AV: NOD32

Firewall: I liked Kerio 2, Kerio 4 gave me BSODs.

Currently though, I don't use an AV.

 

[Ice Czar]

Virus Wars
a sort of pedestrian crystal ball artical at PC Magazine

but with a few highlights here and there

The virus writers are constantly trying to one-up each other by evolving their code with each new variant, but they're also trying to one-up the antivirus industry. Take Sundermeier's example of a recent back-and-forth: In the past, you might have found viruses on attachments boasting of nude celebrities, so businesses filtered executable extensions at the gateway. The virus authors then started zipping up their attachments.

In response, security firms had their scanning engines scan archives to block the ZIP files. Only days later, the authors fired back with password-protected ZIP files, which could bypass antivirus screening, as the software couldn't decrypt and take a guess at a password. As a result, Central Command learned to parse an e-mail message for the password and store it in memory so they could decrypt and virus-scan it. A week went by, says Sundermeier, and the authors "stopped including the password as a text file. It was a bitmap file, which completely screwed up our game plan."

Writers speak of multiplatform viruses and viruses that will infect icons, cursors, or media files or damage CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives. Advances in computing technology will inevitably extend the terrain for viruses; soon viruses could target instant messaging, peer-to-peer networks, voice-mail systems, handheld devices, Microsoft Xboxes and other consoles, and mobile phones (which will lead to cell-phone antivirus software).

BlueOwl believes the cyberbattles among authors will eventually breed worms that fight by trying to remove each other. What's more, he says, "virus authors have been inspired by real biological bacteria and evolution. So there have been thoughts about viruses which use genes when making new variants of themselves, and even female and male viruses that will be able to mate and have offspring resembling themselves." BlueOwl has seen only test runs so far, but he says, "If a mass mailer used it, it could really spread BIG."

If virus writers are trending toward malice and developing new strategies to elude antivirus companies, why haven't we seen the Big One—a rapidly spreading virus that attempts to destroy data? roy g biv, a 25-year-old Austrian writer for the group 29A, says it's not that easy: A virus has to "get lucky" to spread far, or it needs a widespread hole to exploit so it can spread quickly. If it spreads quickly, however, it will be detected quickly. What's more, if the payload runs too soon, the virus will destroy itself, and if it runs too late, the antivirus companies will stop it.

Scanning engines have also become more sophisticated. Five years ago, the scanning process was simple pattern matching. As Panda's Hinojosa puts it, "Advances in virus writing and polymorphic viruses have made pattern matching increasingly obsolete....Because these things spread so fast, there isn't necessarily time to get our signature file to the users. So heuristics started getting beefed up."

With more intelligent heuristics, scanners could interpret macro instructions and find them in specific parts of a file. They would look for files that were doing something suspicious and work on a point system. For example, if a file were searching for e-mail addresses, that would be one point. If it were trying to start up an SMTP engine, that would be another.

NOD32 being big on heuristics for quite some time

So the challenge now becomes: How do you generically stop something through behavior-based phenomena? Because with something that gets spammed out to 10 million people, you don't necessarily have time to get it analyzed, a signature file deployed, and the users updated in 5 minutes worldwide. This moves us into having to detect malware at the network level before we know what it is. That is the wave of the future.

off to look for the beta thanx for the tip