Antivirus/malware - what to use?

[Bev]

Currently, our staff laptops are all protected by Symantec Anti-Virus. It's 'Client Security' but they are unmanaged clients and pick up liveupdates daily.

We seem to pick up lots of Malware - particularly fake 'Antivirus' programs. Todays is 'XP Antispyware' but I've seen many varients.

I can generally clean them up with Malware Bytes, but I'm wondering why Symantec lets them through, and if it's worth buying MalwareBytes Pro to try and prevent them getting infecting? I must get 1 or 2 a month and we are only a very small school.

The machines which stay in school seem to be ok, so I presume the council's firewall blocks them but when they go home, they are getting through.

[blahblah]

I have exactly the same problems at my school and am looking for recommended AV software. We currently use the councils supplied McAfee and again the problems seem to arise when the laptops are taken home.

[RTFM]

We use Vipre and it's v.nice. Picked up so much stuff that Sophos missed it was unreal, cleared it out and none of it has come back.

The active scan on USB's and stuff is quite nice as typically that is going to be how viruses come into school so, recommendation for Vipre from me

[Gibbo]

We've been using ESET NOD32 for many years and - touch wood - has been fantastic. It catches and blocks loads of stuff. Set up an administration server and its very easy to deploy and configure.

[Duke5A]

We use Symantec End Point 11 on our clients, and have it centrally managed. It's extremely easy to deploy, effortlessly installs over top of Symantec Corporate 10.x, and is pretty easy to administer through the console. The problem though is it doesn't do a very good job of doing what it was designed to do. I have about three staff members a week with some flavor of fake AV software pop up. Most of time the machine will be blatantly infected and Symantec is completely oblivious to it with nothing showing in the logs. AV defs will be up to date too.... ug....

[franklin]

We have a centrally managed Kaspersky installation. It seems stable and we haven't had an infection in quite some time. The automatic 'pushing out' of database and program updates from the management server seems to work well in our locked down Active Directory environment. The firewall part of it can be a little too sensitive at times (we have some programming and Web design students who require network access outside of normal Web browsing) but it can be turned off from the server for specific machines. We previously had Symantec which was okay but failed us a couple of times and we were offered a better price with Kaspersky.

[bio]

+1 NOD32 here

bio..

[Millgate]

Hi,

I'd recommend Vipre. Seems to pick up everything as well as being very cost effective. They nearly always do offers such as buy 3 years and get the 3rd free ect. They do plenty. Let me know if you need anything like quotes, trials or white papers

Cheers

Luke

[TheMinister]

ESET Smart Security
ESET Cybersecurity

[psillars]

The Kaspersky solution is a really solid and works well.

I believe GlobalAXS/M247 who advertise on here can get some good deals and trial keys if required.

Paul

[vikpaw]

I can't stand Symantec. AVG would be my choice, i guess if they are school owned laptops, you'd need to buy Pro or managed.

Whatever solution you go for, it needs to be a full security package, not just Anti-virus element.
We have Symantec Endpoint protection here and that incorporates, AV and network security, threat protection etc.

On personal / private machines i've always used AVG for antivirus - then coupled with Spybot live + AdAware passive, all free, for protection and never had a problem. Though if the user allows something through the firewall, and clicks yes on the 'rupture registry' popup, then your protection is worthless!

Most of the major packages have a full protection option, which you would think would run more efficiently than separate programs all competing to look at what's new on the block.