Sorry if I posted this in the wrong section. Mods please move it to the right section. Anyway, I was searching the net for best performing security softwares and I came across this link
I presently use Avast free anti virus in combination with Zone alarm free firewall, I had rootkit infection twice with this setup, it was pretty impossible to remove the rootkit and I had reformat the my pc. Can any other users explain if I should take the results seriously, is Avast really good? Please clear my doubts.
@ sepiashimmer
It also rather depends on what these rootkits were, there are a couple doing the rounds and the malware removal specialists are seeing this on virtually all AVs.
Whilst they are able to get in, avast is one of the few that is actually able to keep it from getting much worse, by blocking access to other malware sites for it to download more malware or possibly upload harvested data from your system.
I believe essexboy said in another post, not too long ago, that the problem is not with Avast! not being able to detect a rootkit; it now detects, for example, all versions of the Serifef rootkit, but it cannot detect all versions of a dropper used to initiate the infection routine.
It is the dropper that gets by Avast!, and it is the same with the other a/v’s. Malware writers will change this dropper code almost hourly to evade detection.
Where Avast! is better, is in preventing deeper damage to your system by holding the malware in check.
Leak tests are popular mainly because they are very easy to perform: you simply run a program, and it tells you if it passed or failed the test. However, life is not that simple, unfortunately.
The primary goal of a firewall is to keep hackers out of your system, that is, prevent inbound attacks in the first place. It’s astonishing that many firewaller “testers” only focus on outbound protection, completely ignoring the inbound part (which is absolutely vital). It’s like they assumed it worked flawlessly in case of all the products, which, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be the case, really.
Next, outbound protection is of course also important, but so called leak tests are not everything. There’s a myriad of other things that a decent firewall should do, and which are usually not assesed by these tests. All I’m saying is that testing a firewall is a very complex task and focusing on leak tests is a gross (and inappropriate) simplification.
