December 13, 2007

For several years now, we've been trying to convince our customers not to risk their safety by using the Free Edition of AVG Antivirus. While it is certainly the best "free" antivirus solution available, it is by no means a 100% solution and Grisoft (the company that produces AVG) knows that as well as we do.

We firmly stand behind their flagship product, AVG 7.5 Professional, and have sold it, along with their other stellar products since 2003. As far a we're concerned, for AntiVirus and Internet Security there is no better product in production today. The free edition, howerver, is worth approximately what you pay for it. If you have no money, it's certainly better than no protection at all, but it misses a lot of threats, leaving you dangerously exposed to infection unless you're incredibly careful (and paranoid) when surfing the web.

Just this week we had the ultimate in proof to our position, produced screen shots during the cleanup and here, in all their glory are the images to reinforce our position that using 'free' Internet Security products is foolish, not just a little dangerous... and very expensive.

When the computer in question first came to us, the owner complained of virus-like behavior in his computer. We get this a lot, and asked all the routine questions regarding symptoms, how long this had been going on, etc. and the client left his unhappy computer in our capable hands for repair.

Our initial diagnostics revealed a large number of infected processes running at boot time and very poor overall performance. Suspicious processes and applications were running, some of which could not be disabled or would re-enable themselves after reboot. This is common behavior for Hijackers, Trojans, some Worms and Viruses, we've seen it literally hundreds of times, so we set to work removing the pests layer by layer.

We did a cursory manual cleanup, disabling what infectious processes we could before installing the full AVG Internet Security Suite from Grisoft to do a thorough scan of the infected system.

Immediately upon starting the scan, we started seeing dialog boxes like this one.

The endless stream of warning dialogs never stopped for the countless hours is took to find and fix or remove the infected files. Along with the seemingly endless collection of Viruses, Worms and Spyware we found on this computer, there was one folder containing over 26,000 Trojans (in the shared music folder), designed to lure unsuspecting surfers into downloading 'free' software, music, movies, etc., thereby infecting their computers. This is known as a zombie.

The total amount of time to thoroughly clean this system of it's 29,499 infected files spanned four days in our shop. See the dialog box below for a screenshot of the total number of infections removed by AVG Internet Security. This does not include the substantial amount of manual repair and subsequent manual removal of a very nasty Rootkit.

In all fairness, this computer does not hold the record in our shop for infections. In April 2007 we had a computer come into our shop, protected by Norton Internet Security 2006 with almost the same set of conditions. This computer, however, had a grand total of 34,363 infected files with 30,850 Trojans in one folder.

What are you using for Internet Security?

Warren Paul Harris

Warren Harris owns and operates The Computer Wizard in Plano, Texas

The Computer Wizard
3131 Custer Road, Ste 175
Plano, TX 75075
972.781.0011
www.thecomputerwizard.biz