TW Blog :: Archives for June 2004

The Anti-Virus Virus

Relates to Security and The Office

I have found in recent weeks one major cause of interruption has been support assistance to clients whose computers are malfunctioning. In a strange twist of irony, several recent calls have been for indicative viral infection which have actually turned out to be anti-viral infection. There have been no trace of the common imprints left by Sasser, GaoBot and other variants of these deviant worms. Instead the problems appear to have arisen as a result of infectious automatic updates of the anti-virus software which have left required libraries absent from the system. Catch-22 ensues. The AV software has to be disabled for the computer to run, but then it is not possible to retrieve any further repair patches through the automated system. The vendors rarely have any support information on this! I am not going to name names except to say that for three clients I worked with three different products. All three of them a household name - you guess!

As a result of this I decided to delve deeper into the AV product lines on the market. The product that seemed to come out on top in most comparison charts was Bit Defender. I have a client test-driving the professional version with integrated firewall right now. I would be quite keen to join in if I could make the time to hard uninstall all the stray components of my current AV! An evaluation version is available for 30 day trial.

Posted on Sunday, Jun 20, 2004 at 03:34:44.