Fundamental Protection

The most fundamental protection you install on your computer is virus protection.

There are a number of major players besides Norton: Mcafee, F-Prot, Kaspersky, NOD32 (a corporate version of Norton), and others. You might think choosing among them is easy. Simply test each one against all the known viruses and select the product that catches the most.

Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. There’s extensive discussion in the forums. Here I’ll summarize the complications. Price is not among them; in all cases the price is trivial compared to the protection you get.

Virus products use resources. You have real time protection. The product is scanning every email, every upload and download, and much more. Virus applications are hooking into the operating system at the lowest levels, guarding against threats to your registry, your boot records, your file system. They visibly slow down your computer, some far more than others.

When an email attachment or internet window tries to run a malicious script, a virus fighter has what is called an ‘unpacking engine’ that scans the attachment or script first. Some are slower than others, some more effective than others. There’s a trade-off between the two.

Installation defaults differ. Some products install real-time protection and email scanning. Some products automatically update the virus reference engine while others do not.

Whose opinions would you want on which product offers the best trade-off? I want the opinions of hackers. Two of the largest hacker forums recently held polls on which anti-virus program the members used. At one, Norton got a 58% vote, second 19%. At the other, Norton won 64% of the vote. I use Norton, so I’m recommending it. You can buy. Norton AntiVirusTM2004 almost anywhere.

Norton is manufactured by Symantec. Visit them at http://www.symantec.com/

An anti-virus program without real-time protection is useless. Norton’s default scan of every file on your computer is once a week. I do a complete scan every night, and suggest you do so as well.

An anti-virus program without an up to date virus reference database is next to useless. New threats are targeting your computer almost daily. Norton by default installs automatic update. You should check to make sure that automatic update is turned on.

Let’s tackle these one by one.

I bought Norton AntiVirusTM2004 as part of a larger package called NortonSystemWorksTM2004. I’m not recommending you do so. SystemWorks can be a real resource hog, and even dangerous. But that’s another column.

However, if you buy Norton AntiVirus alone, your screen shot will look a little different than mine below. You can open Norton in two ways. One by right-clicking the Norton icon in the task bar. Two by opening Norton from the Start Menu.

Click Status if it’s not already open. If Auto-Protect is Off, click it and turn it on. Same for Email Scanning, Script Blocking and Automatic LiveUpdate.

Next click Scan for Viruses. Your menu will be similar to that below. Click the icon below task schedule.

Here’s my schedule. A full scan every evening. I recommend you do the same, but you can use the controls to suit yourself.

Norton AntiVirus has a trick up it’s sleeve. Given the popularity of file sharing systems, it’d be a good bet that some of you are using ‘cracked’ versions of some programs. Norton searches to see if it is a cracked version.

Now since I’ve gone public with a computer column, I wouldn’t dare risk an illegal program on my computer, even to make a point. So I asked somebody else to install a hacked version of Norton. After installation and a scan, he got this message:

Notice how Norton entices you to delete its main program. Are you going to click Skip every time? Every Time?

Buy the program.

Dennis Turner

Dennis Turner is a world-class professional computer programmer. He is not available to answer personal computing or technolgy questions, and certainly not for hacking requests. If you or your company has any serious and difficult-to-solve programming needs, you can contact him at [email protected].