Cyberdanger by Eddy Willems

Author:Eddy Willems
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030045319
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This is another misconception that we see time and time again: 83% of the survey population believed this statement to be correct. But it’s a fairy tale! Clearly, you can use a free antivirus program instead of a for-fee package: however, to do so safely requires more in-depth knowledge and a willingness and ability to use other technical tools. If a competent antivirus program is carefully matched to a firewall, perhaps the one supplied with the operating system, and combined with other security software, a level of security is possible that is quite comparable to that of a paid-for security suite. However, I’d recommend that you leave this DIY option to the technically savvy minority of “nerds.” And even nerds may not know enough to protect themselves adequately: people whose main focus is on other areas of security often overestimate their own understanding of malware.

For most free virus programs, there is also a for-fee and feature-rich counterpart. Can you give me one good reason why manufacturers would do this if the free version provided equally good protection?

At the time of writing, Microsoft are going to some lengths to emphasize the increased detection capabilities of Windows Defender, the utility that replaces the built-in Microsoft Essentials utility in recent Windows versions. And, indeed, independent testing suggests that its functionality is much greater than that of the much earlier product (also called Windows Defender), which detected only adware and spyware. It certainly beats the long-gone Microsoft Antivirus (MSAV), which was infamous for its inability to cope with polymorphic viruses. It seems to hold its own against other free products in detection performance, though it doesn’t have the sophistication of most full-blown commercial products. (Nor has it succeeded in driving commercial security software out of business, despite the gloomy prognostications of so many journalists.)

However, those who rely solely on free antivirus protection take significantly greater risks than someone who has paid for sound anti-malware protection. The difference starts with the update cycle: Sometimes, free antivirus programs are updated once a day using a database containing detection algorithms for the most recently discovered malware and in some cases some known vulnerabilities in the operating system and other software, whereas most commercial programs update their databases every hour or even more frequently. (Though the frequency of updates isn’t always a dependable indicator of how good a security program is.) Nevertheless, if the free version of a product takes much longer to receive an update to detect a newly discovered malicious program than the for-fee version, this means that the free version provides an expanded window of opportunity for the cybercriminal and therefore significantly less protection. This is because the nature of the threat is such that by the time an update is received, malware may have already used that expanded window to infiltrate the PC, having had more time to find its way in. (In general, products that don’t have a for-fee counterpart are outside the framework of the mainstream security community and don’t have the same benefits of cooperation between competing vendors and their research labs.

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