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"Jim S" <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1276q418wyf6f.dlg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>I *stupidly* opened a zipped attachment - I know - I know (but there was a
> reason I won't go into). It contained win32-trojan.gen{other}
>
> I have used Avast for years now and always sung its praises, however
> although Avast did flag the virus and shout at me (as it does), whatever
> action I took >delete>repair>put-in-vault or whatever, the trojan kept
> coming back on reboot. The same was true about SpybotS&D.
>
> In the end I downloaded SuperAntiSpyware free and it removed the trojan in
> a trice.
>
> The question is: would AVG have done any better?
>
> Windows XP SP3
> --
> Jim S
> Tyneside UK
> www.jimscott.co.uk
Jim,
I can't answer your question, would AVG have done any better? What I can
say though is that Trojan-horse programs are most likely updated by the
authors faster than the vendors can keep up with the latest versions.
When you consider that identity theft (credit card numbers, personal info,
etc.) is a billion dollar industry - there is real monetary incentive for
the bad-guy's to stay ahead of the good guy's - and they do. Do a little
research on identity theft and you'll find some white papers written by the
"experts" that will really open your eye's. The bad guy's (the real pro's in
this case) do not want to harm your system or create any kind of disruption
that would draw attention to their back-door efforts of gleaning info from
your PC. They want to be able to snoop your system not only today but again
in the future when you may have entered your new credit card numbers or
other personal info that would be valuable to them.
What can you do about it? Actually quite a bit but eventually (as you found
out), you will most likely get bit if you access the internet. Quite
literally, you're playing Russian roulette in a sense because a good share
of the identify theft has been traced back to Russia with China a close
second.
A client of mine recently had two of his systems infected by Trojan-horses
while running a well known antivirus package that gets updated daily. He
got caught by the latest version of the "Storm" which at that time had a new
signature as of 16 Aug. Turns out, two hours later the new signature from
the vendor was in the daily update. Two hours to late for him....
The old argument about which is the best antivirus is a moot point - there
is no "best". Independent labs do monthly testing to see what software is
catching the most active malware and rates them accordingly. So one month
vendor - XXX - is the flavor of the month and a month later, someone else
does better and on and on it goes. Then it's who can package the most
features and market the bloatware. Amazing how well the bloatware sells
too.
A multi-layer approach (firewall, antivirus software with root-kit
detection, email protection, etc.) does increase your odd's but it's still
only a matter of time. I have some pretty good defenses running not only on
my systems but also on my clients and stupidity still prevails. So the best
defense is a rock solid back up scheme that images your drives and stores
those images on a network drive, USB drive, Windows Home Server system or
secondary drive on your PC. Software such as "Ghost", "Save & Restore",
"WHS" and others that provide a bootable CD, USB or a network resource to
recover from is well worth the cost. There may be some freeware that
provides that type of capability but I'm not aware of any that works across
a network. If anyone else is aware of one - please jump in.
When you consider how long it can take to rebuild a system from scratch,
(OS, applications, utilities, updates, service-packs) and get everything
tweaked and tuned - you will have some long hours invested. If you're paying
somebody to do that - then having a backup plan/system is the low cost
alternative versus paying someone to restore your system.
Finally a word about the paid version of AVG. My brother-in-law uses v7.5
on the system he has at his sporting goods shop. This month alone (Aug 08)
the virus vault claims it has trapped 26 Trojan-horses and blocked many
email viruses. He has 6 email business accounts and gets several hundred
email spam's per hour on each account. I have run 3 different on-line
scanners against his system this month to see if any of those Trojan-horses
got through. None of the on-line scanners reported finding any malware. So
while I personally don't care for AVG (it's clumsy...), I have to admit it's
working like a champ for him. But I also beat into him "You open that
email - you bought it...".
My understanding is that the free version of AVG uses the same engine as the
pay version but you don't get the auto update feature. There may be other
differences too.
Bob S.
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