Viruses ain’t got s*** on Avira
Recently I *somehow* got myself talked into fixing a handful of “pc’s that were acting up”. It was more like 7 of them actually. Different people, some had multiple busted machines. May was charity repair month, lol.
Anyways, back to my point. These machines were infected to the most extreme case you can imagine. So infected, that when you run in safe mode the number of hits on the scanner gets so high it runs out of room on the temp page file and crashes the machine :x. Normally, I run a base scan and look at the results. If it takes more than an hour or two to clean all of it up and run the scans then I wipe it and start over with a fresh install. I refused to do that on these machines.
After a lot of work that seemed to get nowhere I started googling general malware info and ran across a nice list of programs and a “clean pc attack plan” (which I will list at the end of the article). In this list of programs was a free virus scanner called Avira AntiVir. I saw that a few different forums had people recommending it, so I hoped that was not the result of good marketing and installed the program on one of the infected machines. I would like to state that I usually run something like AVG free on client’s pc’s because well..it’s free and works well. Well, I *thought* it worked well.
Avira scanned away and holy cow did it find a lot of stuff. I knew the machines were bad off but it did a good job of finding a lot of the stuff and getting rid of it rarely requiring a reboot to delete stuff in running in the ram. I finished fixing these machines one by one and loaded Avira onto each one. In the end, I only rebuilt 1 from scratch. The rest of them got riddled with tests so much that I felt they were safe to use again. But this is not the end of my story, else this would be a rather stupid point.
I put Avira onto my home pc, and my work laptop AFTER I removed the existing antivirus. The work laptop was running Etrust Antivirus from Computer Associates. The home computer was running Eset’s Nod32 Antivirus. Both machines were reported clean by their antivirus applications. After my Avira scans finished I found quite a few things that were hidden away in some very old folders from college. Some of them were false hits but the point is that I had some long hidden away info stealers hidden on the machines I use every day to bank, write code, pretty much run my life.
This little antivirus by Avira is one great product. I’m so happy with it that I want to deploy it to all of the machines at work. As of this time, there is only a free version and a premium version of their product. Both products share the same scanning engine/database but the premium one auto-updates and schedules it’s own scans. In the free one you have to manually do both of those items.
Avira is missing a few key features for the corporate world though:
1. No “server managed” GUI, so no pushing out updates or remote installs to new machines.
2. Not enough USA resellers/support of product. It took me a week to get info. What happens when a new zero day exploit hits and I need to talk to someone NOW?
3. No “Seat Based” licensing package. Managing 50 keys is ridiculous.
I hope to see a “corporate” product out of Avira one of these days. I have sent them my comments so I only hope they take some of them into account for their future product.
It is hard to change away from AVG. I have used them for so long. Ever since version 8 came around though it’s footprint on the OS has grown like crazy and it actually slows down all the old machines I install it on. Definitions no longer go out to earlier versions or I would keep an old installer around of pre version 8.
Do you have a favorite virus application that you stand behind, frequently use to build friends computers with, etc? Why is it on your list? Because of a good track record or something else?
My “clean pc attack”
1. install Malware Bytes’ Anti-Malware application. Update it, and scan. Clean anything it finds.
2. install Avira AntiVir. Update it, and scan. Clean anything it finds.
3. install spybot. Update it. Immunize. Scan. Clean anything it finds.
4. Uninstall malware bytes’ anti-malware (because we’re about to add another malware app in a second)
5. install SuperAntiSpyware. Update it. Scan. Clean anything it finds.
6. install HijackThis. Use it to clean up your entries and get rid of any hijackers or useless shortcuts. Be super careful when using this though, there are many tutorials on google though to help you.
7. boot to safe mode
8. scan with superantispyware. clean anything it finds.
9. scan with avira. clean anything it finds.
10. Reboot.
11. If your pc is fairly new and quick then you can leave superantispyware installed. If it’s a bit older and already a bit slow, then uninstall this application. You still will have spybot to protect you from future infections.
So this is the attack I usually use. You are left with Avira and Spybot. Both are good enough to do the job, you just have to keep them updated. Don’t forget to keep java updated too.
For the really nasty viruses i will use an avira Live disc or a knoppix disc with Clam antivirus on it. But those are rarer these days.