IT/computer guys: Best antivirus/firewall?

[2Bad4Ya]

anti virus is a must have, and there are amyn flavors and personal favorites.

I work for a major financial institute and we have some serious security demands on our machines. We can't have some virus or hacker run loose on our systems, one or two times of that happening and the bad publicity would be well spread across the world.

That all being said... we use pc cillin from trend micro, I figured it was good enuff for my employor so I have been running it for the last 4-5yrs with no issues. I think its great and does not seem to be the system hog borton and mcaffee are.

In junction with that I also use spybot S&D, it is a great tie in to my anti virus software. This keeps spyware/malware in check and off my system.

Those 2 applications behind a firewall and no virus'/spyware on my personal machines in around 5 yrs (knock on wood).

[tones2SS]

I use ZONE ALARM as a firewall and AD-AWARE & SPYBOT for the other things.
I also use a NORTON's complete virus scan once a week.

[Flash68]

I've been using Avast and Ad-aware (both free and very popular) for years..... with no issues on any of my computers.

Get them at downloads.com

[awr68]

I just had my IT friend rebuild my machines and he loaded Avast on them...so far so good! The reason for the rebuilds? I got hit hard about a month ago...damn viruses!!

[novanutcase]

I've used NAV for years and was thinking of doing the same thing when my friend who does 3rd party IT suggested I use Symantec End Point. Updates are seamless and I haven't had any issues for the last year.

John

[mazspeed]

Hey Scott. I'm running NAV 09 360.3 and it works great, but only problem is, is that it doesn't get malware. For that I have malwarebytes. http://www.malwarebytes.org/ This is the best program against malware and worms that I have ever seen. It gets everything. I run it on all my computers.

[Speedster]

We deal with this and have to re-evaluate our secure networks regularly.

The old stand-bys:
1.Norton (Symantec) Anti-Virus (NAV2009) /Internet Security (NIS2009)
2. McAfee - various flavors (Total Protection 2009)

They both work "most" of the time. Not too good on Malware/Spy bots. People in the past have supplemented these with Ad-Aware (Lavasoft).

The ones that are starting to dominate NAV and McAfee are:
AVG and Kapersky. We have seen many cases where these have picked up virus/malware/spyware/etc. that NAV and McAfee missed. In addition, Norton and McAfee are incredible resource hogs...

We used all four for quite some time and as the final licenses expire, we have chosen AVG Internet Security (8.5 now) going forward. For us, it has proven to be the best for the items mentioned above including SPAM.

Windows Firewall is actually pretty good, but also remember, it is the most hacked.

Since it is for home use, it is not a big deal, but at some time you may wish to switch to a hardware firewall and then just run anti-virus on your local machine.

Of course you can be real hardcore and run Unix based OS which really lowers security threats, but they still exist.

Anyway, just some observations from real-world usage, FWIW.