Recently I got my hands on a new laptop and during the initiation process, I got to the part of which antivirus software to use. Which one do you use and why? Have you considered or tried any open source ones as ClamAV or Open AntiVirus Project?
Linux.<p>In all seriousness though: without knowing anything about state of the art AV software I question how effective even big brand software is without compromising your own operating system integrity these days.<p>Whenever I encountered cases of an infected system in the last 5 years or so it was nothing regular AV software could have caught anyway. Specific tools had to be downloaded for removal and if you put this in contrast to the annoying number of false positives you start to question the effectiveness. I imagine all of this is of course highly subjective.
I've mixed feelings about AV. It's very disruptive and most really only work well with Windows (Mac and Linux are second-class citizens for most products). That said, over the past year I've helped my father get rid of malware on his mac twice. And at work, we've seen AV block browser-based bitcoin miners. And yet our AV has also caused computers to be unable to boot after automatic upgrades.<p>If you want to run AV, check if your OS already has one (Windows Defender is standard on Windows and Mac has its own AV product and firewall). Turn those on. Avoid ClamAV, it has a lot of false positives, usually on something important.
Malwarebytes Anti Malware (MBAM). It is exceptional for a free tool. Windows Defender is too simplistic for my liking, with a very small filter list.<p>That being said, I run ComboFix + ADWCleaner + RKill + JunkwareRemovalTool every few weeks to remove any malware that may have creeped in.
Don't use AV because it's slow and annoying. But I do use sandboxie (1) for untested programs and that takes care of most of the problems.<p>(1) <a href="https://www.sandboxie.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.sandboxie.com</a>
Depends on usage. Going to browse sketchy websites all day? Probably need something.<p>Just doing dev work on Linux and also <i>Thinking before clicking</i>(TM)? Probably <i>CommonSense2018</i>(C) will be enough.<p>Keep in mind that AV software also runs as very high authority on a system, and they all had serious vulnerabilities, annoying popups, etc.<p>A lying DNS + IP blacklist could also help protect you. see for UNIX-like systems e.g. <a href="https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/blackhole" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/blackhole</a> & <a href="https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/lie-to-me" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/lie-to-me</a>
When in the US or EU : Kaspersky or 360.
When in China: Mcafee or F-Secure.
Etc.<p>All big commercial names are sufficient; just not at keeping nation states out of your machine.