MEPIS Community Forum

I can see that happening, but I fear it would be just one more unenforceable law.

You mean outlaw stupid?

In most countries the law makers should think that's to close to suicide. They would rather do the opposite to silence all the nagging.
Henry

Anyway, such a law would be absolutely pointless. In the case I cited above for example, the thing blew right past the installed and updated AV.

Of course, that wouldn't stop lawmakers from wasting a lot of time on such useless legislation. As Uncle Mark points out, you can't fix stoopid.

No one is immune, and anyone can get bit. The question is, how much time, energy, and resources can/will one invest to limit one's vulnerability to the greatest extent? Where does the point of diminishing returns take over? It's like Zeno's Paradox -- you can approach a fully secure environment, but never quite get there.

Let's say the MSE is 90% effective, and MBAM Pro is 90% effective on the remaining 10%. That's 99%. Pretty darn good. But maybe Avira is 95% effective, and MBAM is still 90% effective on the remaining 5%. You end up at 99.5%. If MSE has benefits over Avira other than its detection rate (fewer false positives, for example, or ease of use, i.e. set-and-forget), do they outweigh that 0.5% increase in presumed protection?

In my opinion, for the users I support, they do.

Of course, if it wasn't for freaking iTunes, I'd have my users running Linux. If I'm going to put myself out of business by locking down Windows installs to the point that they never get infected, I might as well do it right.

And where have we heard this before?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18288710

Perhaps something like a Drivers License? Required before you can legally connect? That doesn't fix stoopid but it might help the simply non-enlightened.

Too many assumptions. There may be no extra detection using it along with MSE until your system is already infected with something missed by them. ;-)

Actually, the last detection test of Malwarebytes I saw (granted it was a couple of years back) showed that Malwarebytes was nowhere near as good as most of the mainstream AV products (only detecting something like 77% of the samples used for tests).

It's just a lot better than most at malware removal (and detection of stuff that shouldn't be running in memory). It was especially bad with root kits. That may have changed by now. But, I wouldn't assume that it detects any more than other products (just because you're using more than one product doesn't mean that you have a higher overall detection rate). It's just better at getting rid of stuff that others don't see with an already infected system (as malware can more easily hide from many AV scanners and Malwarebytes is better at finding them when they're trying to hide than some products around).

But, as the old saying goes, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". So, it's best not to get infected to begin with, so that you don't need products like Malwarebytes to help out. ;-)

As the old saying goes, "Easier said than done."

Hence, this thread.

I do it the cautious way...

See the products I'm using in my previous posts, where I have multiple AV programs used for detection, as well as the Comodo Firewall on top of that (which basically looks at program behavior and requires my OK for virtually anything a new program wants to do). IOW, it's a "white list" approach versus using a "black list" approach that you'd get with signature only based detection.

Basically, it's treating any program as "guilty until proven innocent", so that virtually anything a new program wants to do (updating registry entries, comm settings, etc.) requires my OK until the system "learns" my answers and lets it work normally. That results in more warning screens that I have to OK with new programs. But, I'd rather put up with the extra warnings versus risking a malware infection because something is modifying system files and settings without my knowledge that isn't caught by other AV products I'm running.