Seriously, has anybody ever seen a serious virus problem in Windowswhen using AV protection?

Moshe wrote:
On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:51:55 -0700 (PDT), RayLopez99 wrote:

Seriously, has anybody seen--or even heard--of a serious virus
(including rootkit or malware) problem in Windows when using
commercial antivirus protection?


Several of my correspondents have had their machines compromised by
spyware/etc, happens about once every couple of months. Sign: e-mails
with appropriated addresses and inappropriate content. _All_ of them had
McAfee or Norton installed. Most of them even paid the yearly
subscription (update) fee.

My wife's machine was compromised about three years ago. We changed her
e-mail address, and installed AVG, and then (after AVG became bloated
and slow) Avira as primary protection. Also scan with MBAM, Spybot S&D,
etc, about once a month, just in case.

cheers,
wolf k.

On Mar 23, 5:28*pm, Moshe wrote:
On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:51:55 -0700 (PDT), RayLopez99 wrote:
Seriously, has anybody seen--or even heard--of a serious virus
(including rootkit or malware) problem in Windows when using
commercial antivirus protection?

It happens all the time.
Usually brought in from outside sources and when the person
bypasses the checking.

It's like everything else in the world, you can't prevent an idiot
from circumventing the tools put in place to protect him.

Moshe, your examples are fine, but they are not what I'm talking
about. That's not a real example since the user deliberately
circumvented safeguards to keep out the virus from their system. In
other words, anybody can disable their AV software, or ignore repeated
warnings, and "install" the virus on their system deliberately (or
even 'accidentally' through negligence).

That's not a true virus infection.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Mar 23, 11:11 am, peterwn wrote:
On Mar 23, 8:51 pm, RayLopez99 wrote:

Seriously, has anybody seen--or even heard--of a serious virus
(including rootkit or malware) problem in Windows when using
commercial antivirus protection?

Yes. I had to clean up a Windows laptop last year despite things
being kept up to date and AV installed. The AV was bloody hopeless at
setecting it despite being kept up to date.

OK fine. Outlier. One in a million I would reckon.

Tell us what virus it was, as that info should not be confidential.
Unless it was so obscure that only one user, your client, had it.

Anybody else?

RL

Are you fer real?

NO commercial AV product stops all viruses/malware. I doubt a month goes by
where I'm not cleaning one nasty or another off of my Windows PC. And if its
not mine, I'm doing about two a month from other people.
And my PC has Kaspersky Internet Security, an I regularly run Malwarebytes,
Superantispyware, Spybot and Crap Cleaner. And once a month it gets an
additional scan with the GMER rootkit scanner.
It depends entirely on what you use yer PC for, what websites you visit etc.

--
SteveH

My brothers home PC was hit by a hacked button on website that he visited
daily for a year or more. His WindowsXP SP3 was attacked by Ransomware that
put a big blurb on the his desktop about needing some fictional antivirus
and it trashed his Microsoft Office and some of his Windows stuff. I ran a
full scan on his system with his Norton 360 and it fixed the Windows problem
and desktop blurb but had to reinstall Office and a couple other programs
trashed. It wasn't a Trojan or something Antivirus could stop since it ran
when he hit link on a normally safe webpage and he didn't do something risky
to do. His is the only system attacked like that I've personally seen;
that is one threat that I've read about in a PC World Security Threats
article.

"RayLopez99" wrote in message
...
Seriously, has anybody seen--or even heard--of a serious virus
(including rootkit or malware) problem in Windows when using
commercial antivirus protection?

One of the claims of the Linux crowd is that such problems are
legion. But talking so some of the people at alt.comp.anti-virus I
get the impression such problems are rare.

Who is more right?

BTW, check out this PDF on AV softwa
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...eAjzJKL ymkDA

It compares 16 commercial programs, and finds Microsoft at #2,
catching 60% of all viruses (Avanti is #1 at 70%). And we're taking
about all viruses, some of which as so obscure I'm sure you'll never
seen one in the wild...

RL

snip

How can you possibly be cleaning at least one nasty every month?

We don't buy it. Name the last virus you cleaned up.

RL


That sounds outlandish to me too. Must be doing some things wrong. The
only time I ever got a virus on one of my windows PCs was back when I had
win3.11 and got some fonts off of a shareware CD. The version of Norton I
had at the time found it and cleaned it fine. I have never had any of my
personal PCs infected since. Of course I have run Linux since '98 on my
primary workstation. Although, I always have some win PCs around as well
and use windows at work.

BB

Peter Köhlmann wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:

Seriously, has anybody seen--or even heard--of a serious virus
(including rootkit or malware) problem in Windows when using
commercial antivirus protection?

Yes

One of the claims of the Linux crowd is that such problems are
legion. But talking so some of the people at alt.comp.anti-virus I
get the impression such problems are rare.

Who is more right?

So the estimate that around 30% of all windows computers are infected
is "rare problems"

[snip]

30%?

What an illogical conclusion from what was said.
Are you a politician??
Same kind of logic they use.
Buffalo

Buffalo wrote:



Peter K�hlmann wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:

Seriously, has anybody seen--or even heard--of a serious virus
(including rootkit or malware) problem in Windows when using
commercial antivirus protection?

Yes

One of the claims of the Linux crowd is that such problems are
legion. But talking so some of the people at alt.comp.anti-virus I
get the impression such problems are rare.

Who is more right?

So the estimate that around 30% of all windows computers are infected
is "rare problems"

[snip]

30%?

What an illogical conclusion from what was said.

It wasn't a conclusion from what was written in this thread

Are you a politician??
Same kind of logic they use.
Buffalo

Are you a Mac user? Those tend to be extremely stupid.
Or are you (even worse) a windows user?
--
If you had any brains, you'd be dangerous.

On 23/03/2010 07:51, RayLopez99 wrote:
Seriously, has anybody seen--or even heard--of a serious virus
(including rootkit or malware) problem in Windows when using
commercial antivirus protection?

One of the claims of the Linux crowd is that such problems are
legion. But talking so some of the people at alt.comp.anti-virus I
get the impression such problems are rare.

Who is more right?


As someone who repairs a lot, I have. However, these have ended up
installed as a result of the pillock at the keyboard ignoring all the
warnings.

--
Conor
I'm not prejudiced. I hate everyone equally.

On Mar 23, 3:51*am, RayLopez99 wrote:
Seriously, has anybody seen--or even heard--of a serious virus
(including rootkit or malware) problem in Windows when using
commercial antivirus protection?

Bagel, Sky, and several others have variants that can disable actual
virus checking and/or quarantine measures without letting the user
know they have been disabled. Fixing things that have been corrupted
this way can be very ugly.

I've had at least a dozen viruses over the last 10 years that have
been so difficult to remove or did such damage that I eventually had
to re-image the hard drive.

Remember, virus writers are ALWAYS one step ahead of the anti-virus
writers. Most viruses don't get the resources to be blocked unless
they've infected a significant number of computers already. Once the
culprit has been identified, it may take weeks to figure out effective
countermeasures. Once the countermeasures have been coded, it may
take another 2-3 weeks to get it distributed via the automatic update
systems, since many people don't update as often as they should.

Meanwhile, the virus writers and script kiddies are deriving new
mutations and variations, designed to avoid detection by the new
counter-measures.

One of the claims of the Linux crowd is that such problems are
legion. *But talking so some of the people at alt.comp.anti-virus I
get the impression such problems are rare.

It depends on who you are talking to. As one antivirus vendor about
another's product. There are roughly 250,000 new viruses released
every year.
These are the ones that got past kasparsky
http://www.viruslist.com/en/analysis?pubid=204792067

http://www.virusbtn.com/index

Who is more right?

Obviously, an antivirus company is coing to do the best they can to
minimize reports of successful attacks to computers protected by their
software, and maximize reports of successful attacks to computers
protected by the software of others.

These days, many companies have taken a more comprehensive stance on
security. For example, Norton 360 provides firewall, execution
protection, anti-virus, anti-spyware, and update control management to
try and keep the bad guys from coming in the front door, and to keep
trojans from letting them in the back door, and to clean up the messes
of any pets that make it inside.

Unfortunately, the biggest trojans - IE and Outlook, cannot be
disabled, and cannot be blocked.

BTW, check out this PDF on AV softwahttp://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...ives.org/image...

It compares 16 commercial programs, and finds Microsoft at #2,
catching 60% of all viruses (Avanti is #1 at 70%). *And we're taking
about all viruses, some of which as so obscure I'm sure you'll never
seen one in the wild...


Since you like this source, here's another good report from them.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/compo...17-reinstalled

How often have you reinstalled (or rollback of image) windows due an
infection in the last 12 months?

never 2258 65.8%
1 time 479 13.9%
2 times 227 6.6%
more than 4 times 194 5.6%
3 times 114 3.3%
living with known infection 86 2.5%
4 times 76 2.2%

So roughly 40 percent of all Windows users have had infections so bad
that they had to , or should have, re-imaged their hard drive at least
once a year.

As for the other 65%, they probably didn't use their computers that
much this year ;-)
Either that, or Microsoft rallied about 2000 of their staunch
supporters to select "never".



RL

On Mar 23, 6:45*pm, "Cyborg-HAF" wrote:
My brothers home PC was hit by a hacked button on website that he visited
daily for a year or more. *His WindowsXP SP3 was attacked by Ransomware that
put a big blurb on the his desktop about needing some fictional antivirus
and it trashed his Microsoft Office and some of his Windows stuff. *I ran a
full scan on his system with his Norton 360 and it fixed the Windows problem
and desktop blurb but had to reinstall Office and a couple other programs
trashed. *It wasn't a Trojan or something Antivirus could stop since it ran
when he hit link on a normally safe webpage and he didn't do something risky
to do. *His is the only system attacked like that I've personally seen;
that is one threat that I've read about in a PC World Security Threats

OK, fine, but essentially your brother accidentally installed a
program he should not have had--kind of like those junk shareware
programs that infect your registry and can never be removed, even
after Uninstall (I have a few myself). But strictly speaking I would
not call this a true virus or rootkit.

And it could happen to somebody in Linux land (accidental installation
of a program).

Anybody else? So far nobody has proved a serious true virus infection
has occurred on a Windows machine.

RL