I wrote a quick article a couple days ago about the Avast meltdown, which caused me no small amount of stress, not only from thinking my kids had gotten one of the computers on my network infected, but also from having to go back and clean up after the mess it caused. Essentially it started tagging everything as infected. Initially I was deleting infected items, but then moved to quarantining them when it seemed something was amiss.
As I promised, not because I have an ax to grind with Avast – anyone can make a mistake, and it’s hard to complain about a problem with free software – I moved to Avira. I don’t have a lot to say about it, other than it installed easily, kept up with it’s updates, and didn’t seem to be overly heavy on resources. It’s hard to really test out an AV program without an infected machine to test it on. Maybe the next one that comes to my front door will be a good test of Avira’s skills. Usually I’ll use my tool of choice to clean up all it can find, and then toss another vendor at it to see if anything was missed. (BTW, I learned this from Norton AV. It used to be somewhat of a commonplace thing to have someone bring me an infected PC that had an up-to-date copy of Norton installed and running. Norton would proclaim the PC clean, and a quick pass with AVG would catch the remaining infections).
Anyway, I didn’t stick with Avira long, mainly because I’ve been wanting to test out Microsoft’s Security Essentials. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no big fan of Microsoft. If it weren’t for specific software and games my kids and wife uses, I’d be a Linux-only shop. BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, my theory is that who is better prepared to protect and clean the Windows OS than Microsoft? After all, it IS their code!
So, it’s MSE on my 2 Windows XP machines now. So far so good. It seems to be happy doing it’s thing, which is leaving me alone while I’m trying to work.
Last evening the kids came to me to let me know their computer was complaining of a Trojan Horse virus. I didn’t have time to deal with it, so I told them to click Delete and let me know if anything else went wrong.
Late last night, the computer was freed up, so I make sure Avast was updated and started a full scan of the hard drive. Surprisingly, every once in awhile it popped up to identify another file infected with a Trojan Horse. At first I didn’t think that much of it; after all, my kids like to download all the 1-hour demo games and it’s not uncommon to have to do some cleanup work every so often to strip off some CoolWebSearch toolbar.
But, as the scan went on, it started getting into programs that concerned me. These were programs that have been installed on the computer for ages. I decided to take a closer look, and the files that were supposedly infected hadn’t had their timestamps altered. Suspicious now, I did a quick Google on the virus name. The first entry had me cursing. Apparently Avast had a problem and they were mistakenly identifying files as infected.
As I understand it from various postings today, the situation didn’t last long. Avast fixed the problem and the new update was released. But, that doesn’t solve MY problem, which is that I was wrongly deleting and/or quarantining files that were NOT infected. I didn’t have time to deal with it last night, but I have a bad feeling I’ve got legitimate apps that will not run now because some of their important files are gone.
At least we’re leading up to a weekend when I’ll have time to spend on it. It could probably use a refresh of XP to clean all the kids’ garbage off of it. I’ve been pretty happy with Avast, and would have probably kept using it, but this will also give me an excuse to try another AV. I’m thinking about trying one I hadn’t heard of before, called Avira. Maybe I’ll do a review after awhile to let you know how it goes.
