[hollyblue]

My antivirus works perfectly, until it comes time to do a full scan on my computer. As of late I think I managed to catch a virus and need to scan my computer to get rid of it. But whenever I go to use the program and tell it to scan, it scans about 92 files, and then just sits there.

I thought maybe it needed some time to scan, and left it on overnight. When I came to it this morning, it was still at 92.

If anyone could help me, I would greatly appreciate it!

-hollyblue

[Elvandil]

Chances are that the virus inactivated the scanner. Try an offline scanner or boot CD with antivirus.

Why Anti-Virus is Dead, and 5 Ways to Protect Your Computer Today (Ignore the Ccleaner recommendation.)

The majority of threats recently could not even be caught by the major anti-virus programs. I read that over 80% of threats last month were not caught by the major anti-virus scanners. Remember that threats are being created at a rate around 800 per minute, and 20,000 per day. No scanner can keep up with that.

[perfume]

Dear Elvandil,
You seem to have opened up a can(Big Time) of worms,simply by posting the article! It means that you have endorsed the opinion of the author!!

Quote"
Anti-virus is dead.
Well, maybe I shouldn’t say dead, because there are still some people that use it" Unquote. "Some people", man, is he joking or what? It would be a disaster if people stopped using A-Vs, simply because all those signature based viruses(the old ones)leave alone the new ones in the wild which "are" contained by A-Vs will cripple the systems! In the same breath, the author okays the use(encourages) of A-V scans! From where did the A-V scans get info'(database) about viruses?



What about "pro-active defense" which is akin to sandboxing a virus if detected and rupturing the malware code, before it enters the system?


A firewall is only as good as it is configured! Is the setting"recommended" or "High"? Are the users really reading the "help" section provided?My guess is most people are happy with the fact that a firewall is installed!



I thank you for the info' about the setup.exe and the size of the exe. files as indicators of a virus.



"Even downloading software from the developer’s site could be dangerous." This is news to me!

I am flabbergasted!

[Elvandil]

Anti-virus just doesn't cut it any more. Look at all the infections on this board.

An Israeli researcher is working on a plan to put protection inside the kernel in the form of heuristics that detect unallowed activity. It has already been tested on the Linux kernel. Heuristics (or virtualization) is the way to go, I think. I know that PrevX, for example, cleaned my machine a few times when nothing else could fix it. But it was so annoying, I always uninstalled it after it was finished.

"It would be a disaster if people stopped using A-Vs"

Would it, really? According to some estimates, over 80% of the threats online last month were not detected by the major AV scanners. Often by the time people come here, their AV's have already been incapacitated by a virus.