Is Antivirus Enough?

[Mike Seidle]

Recently one of my kids got nuked by the "Personal Antivirus" malware. It's a sneaky thing that is installed when you view the wrong (and that means a compromised site, not a bad site) website and then tries to scare you into buying a $19.95 subscription for updates. The funny part is that this thing installed itself despite Norton Security suite being up to date and running.

Recently Symantec's David Hall made a few comments that raised eyebrows - he said, "antivirus alone is not enough." This is a big revelation coming from a product manager for an antivirus product.

That begs the question, what is enough? I've switched from Windows to Linux on most of our computers, just to get away from having to spend 1-2 days per month fixing Windows. The Linux boxes have their warts, but in general don't crash, get infected, and are much easier to keep updated and working. The only Windows computer in my house is the one my daughter uses for Hoosier Academy classes, and cleaning up Personal Antivirus took about six hours of my time.

Here's the question:
Is antivirus software enough?
Do security suites like Norton help?
Is Windows shot from a security perspective?

[Linda J Ranger]

About a year ago I had the same malware problem on my computer. I was told by Norton personnel to NEVER click on any of these warning pop-up screens because once you do you have given the attacker permission to take over your computer...this includes the "close" box. Symantics told me in the future to always close the box/screen by using the command "alt + F4" which closes the screen without using any of the attacker's prompts. Norton for a fee of about $100 took over my computer remotely and cleaned it up while giving me stern advice to never click on anything unusual that appears on my screen but to turn it off using alt F4. It was terrible experience.

Since that experience I have been more careful. I have Norton 360 on my computer and it does a good job and I like that it shows trusted websites with a green check mark and reminds me to bypass those that do not pass.