This wreaked havoc on my office today, and apparently on a number of government offices out east as well. Deleted svchost.exe from our computers, which is a necessary system file for Windows. On the bright side, this "virus attack" let me go home early
Note: With svchost.exe gone, I wasn't able to just drag a working file in Windows to copy it, but I was able to do it in the command prompt (Start Menu -> Run -> CMD).
My company uses Symantec (by Norton) and it works really well.
I am going to bet the IT department disagrees with you. We use Symantec Endpoint Protection and over the last week I have cleaned 4 machines manually, the 5th is so infected that I will just wipe it tomorrow.
The best was the instructions for removing one on the Symantec site was disable system restore and ... run a Symantec scan...of course had Symantec been able to find and clean it, there wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.
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What's truly pathetic is that companies and public institutions impacted by this have no financial recourse to recoup their losses from McAfee. This is far from the first time they have released shoddy updates, and this time it appears that the overall financial loss is probably quite significant when you add up all the computers disabled as a result.
I've used Kaspersky for years now and not one virus has found this or my other 2 computers. That i know of anyways. For all i know this is a trojan user actually posting this...
not free but for 3 computers it's only $90 for 2 years.
The worst part is that it deleted the file without my consent. I saw the warning pop up, told McAfee to NOT delete, but it did anyway. I wish we'd switch over to Kapersky. I'd even take AVG over McAfee damnit!
Oilkiller (I think?) did a couple rounds of tests of antivirus programs based on zero-day threats and I remember Avast scored very well at least in the first test. There is alot more to a virus scanner than how well it detects new threats though, so it isn't a clear cut thing. Someone might be able to link the thread if you need more details.
I use Microsoft Security Essentials, it catches the occasional thing from a torrent so it must be doing something. Hitman Pro and Malware bytes have not caught anything that it has missed so it must be doing something right.
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"Wake up, Luigi! The only time plumbers sleep on the job is when we're working by the hour."
This hit all our office computers at the UofC today. Everybody just ended up going home. I run a mac so I wasn't impacted, meaning I had to stay all f'n day.
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Maximum PC has a pretty good article in their latest issue about anti-virus tests they did.
Avira won last year for them.
I've often wondered, how many businesses actually use a gateway anti-virus? I don't remember how the company is, but someone makes a gateway antivirus that runs Kapersky. Apparently it does an amazing job at stopping viruses at the gateway level.
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I have been using Avast at home and at work for a few years now, and I have no complaints. Many moons ago we had Norton on our computers at work, but we gave up in simply because it is a bloated resource hog.
I switched to Avast! on my old XP rig a little while back and have really liked it. Absolutely no reason to switch so far. For a free app, that's pretty good. Both of my parents also run it on their home Vista desktops with (not insignificantly) zero complaints.
I've also used AVG Free with mostly good results.
I have personally used McAfee and, more extensively, Norton (*ugh*), with much more mixed results. Though it's been a few years since my last use of either, I feel fairly confident when urging folks to avoid these popularized/commercialized brands of AV. The system resource consumption on these beasts was (is?) well beyond excessive, which makes the average protection quality offered look and feel even worse than it is, IMO.
I've heard very good things about Kaspersky and NOD32 over the years... never tried either.
Microsoft has improved their antivirus products drastically in the last few years, to the point where OneCare (and now Security Essentials) is generally considered to be quite reliable and a very good free option after once being an absolute joke.
One other free product worth mentioning is Avira AntiVir, which is known for very strong detection rates, but less user friendly controls/interface than some other free options.
It might be a new conficker update, its making its rounds in the US at least, we have been working on it for 2 days where I work.
Make sure you have XP SP3, download the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool etc.
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McAfee decides that svchost.exe is a virus!
