Anti-virus vendors use different names for viruses so its hard to know if your covered from infection, for example Norton and AVG will probably use different names, so the question is how do you know if the virus definitions released deal with the latest dangerous threats and when they only cover the low end ones? (I know that many dangerous viruses are covered in the updates its just knowing what they do and how bad they are)
The short answer is it is difficult and searching for the malware name is often fruitless there are some sites that have aliases for any given malware name like, http://www.virusbtn.com/resources/vgrep/index.xml. This site is a members only so you have to register (it is free), the problem is it takes time for them to build these aliases, so it isn’t much good for very new names.
Personally I don’t give a stuff about new malware, life is too short and there is little benefit from worrying yourself sick about it. There will always be day zero stuff about and you have to trust your selection of security software.
I continue to use the security software in combination with a healthy dose of common sense; use a more secure browser like Firefox with NoScript Or Opera; run applications that connect to the internet under dropmyrights (or any means of restricting admin privileges) to prevent some of the major issues with malware inheriting your accounts admin privileges.
Add to that plan, if you don’t want to loose it back it up, so you need a back-up and recovery plan. I take weekly images of my hard disk partitions to recover from a major problem, I can restore an exact copy of my partitions in under 15 minutes and then restore my daily back-up of important files, .doc, .xls, emails, address book, bookmarks, etc.
Hi DavidR,
Just a question. How long has this personal formula kept you virus free? Since I went on the forum and learned the right attitude, the only thing I could worry about were some tracking cookies, and they were easily deleted or put to an exclusion list.
I think that people that visit here often and put the things that are propagated here at work will have little to worry about malware, but you have to be consequent then,
polonus
Yes failure to plan is a plan to fail ;D
I haven’t had a virus infection since I installed avast three and a half years, I didn’t have any serious infections for some time before, but avast found a couple of viruses when I ditched AVG.
Mind you I found something in the FF browser cache with avg-as (not active the extension-less and renamed files in the cache make this less likely to be an issue).
But Drive Image has recovered many times from a system crash/BSOD that corrupted files.