Do you really need an Antivirus?

Stormy · May 08, 2014 5:30 AM

I've used both AVG and Avast. They're both good from my experience. Much better than the paid ones like McAfee, at least.

CuttingEdge wrote:

Stormy, if your search engine has been redirected to some crap (like snap.do/do-search) then i recommend you to download AdwCleaner from Xplode Team's official website and delete everything it detects. (Folders, files, services, substituted shortcuts, registry keys/values, everything) .And if you want something to scan for viruses then download MalwareBytes and quick-scan (MB is free (best if you download Chameleon addon for it, it makes it impossible for a malware to become "Invincible" for MB) Some viruses use that option. "Kryptik" is just the worst thing i can think of for you to catch >.<

Oh, this was like four years ago; it's long gone now. And like I said, Malwarebytes wasn't getting it. That just made me even more paranoid because Malwarebytes was supposed to be one of the best programs out there, but every time I ran the scan... nothing. Even though nothing seems to be wrong with any of my computers right now, I still don't fully trust the scan results of any antivirus program. tongue

There are a lot of varieties of search engine redirects out there, but the one I had was a trojan that would redirect every result to about five different URLs before landing on an innocuous-looking page like the Yellow Pages website. I believe the purpose of it was to collect ad revenue from those in-between page hits. Every well-known search engine from Google to Yahoo was affected. The cause turned out to be an infected atapi.sys file which was resolved by Combofix.

I'm sure any modern AV program would detect this thing instantly now since it's so old. tongue

RangerOfIthilien · May 10, 2014 1:36 PM

Never not be afraid of viruses. CuttingEdge, you say you can detect them from a mile away, correct? What if it's a Trojan? Do you honestly check every single process every time you get off the internet?

Last edited by RangerOfIthilien (May 10, 2014 1:59 PM)

CuttingEdge · May 10, 2014 3:24 PM

It's more like that: it's impossible that a virus doesn't leave some sort of trail of it's existence. And when i start to suspect something, i open up sysinternals (like RootkitRevealer), boot up MalwareBytes Chameleon and do a cleanup. And if everything fails, Alert mode with only basic system processes running. Run Chameleon, AdwCleaner, sysinternals, (or Kaspersky Rescue Disc) and do my duty tongue Eventually read something about the events of such, and i usually find answer if anything fails tongue The only thing that i can't remove instead of doing disc format is a "Perfect Keylogger". They just *bleep* me off so much that i'm contemplating of performing a bungee jump without bungee tongue

RangerOfIthilien · May 10, 2014 3:32 PM

Ounce of prevention, pound of cure.

Why do all that work when an anti virus would stop it from even getting that far more often than not?

Stormy · May 10, 2014 4:24 PM

^ This. That's basically what I've been trying to say this entire time. Even if your methods have a 100% detection rate for malware (which is highly unlikely), why waste your time doing all that manually?

Spyrorocks · May 12, 2014 9:10 PM

Because then you can talk to other people on forums about it.

#26 May 08, 2014 5:30 AM

Re: Do you really need an Antivirus?

#27 May 10, 2014 1:36 PM

Re: Do you really need an Antivirus?

#28 May 10, 2014 3:24 PM

Re: Do you really need an Antivirus?

#29 May 10, 2014 3:32 PM

Re: Do you really need an Antivirus?

#30 May 10, 2014 4:24 PM

Re: Do you really need an Antivirus?

#31 May 12, 2014 9:10 PM

Re: Do you really need an Antivirus?

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