blog: who needs antivirus?

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Kilmatead
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

Post by Kilmatead »

Comodo has cleaned up its act quite a bit in the last few years - it doesn't have any major issues except an interface designed by drunk and blind dyslexic pixies who think that High DPI is a campaign to legalise marijuana.

It is still a little too complex and fiddly for pedestrians so I would never recommend it, but I primarily use it for querying/blocking unexpected outgoing connections to the internet by applications which have no need to phone home or anywhere else. If nothing else, it has a handy built-in Sandbox feature (one of the best free ones) for extreme testing conditions, where even image backups fear to tread (exclude access to all local drives, etc).

MWB is safely relegated to run-on-demand status, and despite my far-and-wide browsing-habits to parts unknown, and downloading half of the pirate bay, I've (rather disappointingly, from an entertainment point of view) never caught a thing. :shrug:
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nikos
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

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yesterday I was reading about cryptolocker and sure enough last night I had yet another nightmare (as in bad dream). Apparently this virus is spread by email attachments and I receive (and delete) many of them every day. So in my dream I thought of actually opening one of the attachments, but within the sandbox of a virtual machine. It was a zip archive but running it immediately seized the VM, declaring it pwned in a jiffy, and then to my terror, while I was trying to close down the VM, it spread to the main laptop, informing me of the uncalled-for foul play. How it spread out of the VM into the host? Those MS engineers that invariably fail to patch vulnerabilities should be shot. Thankfully I had all the files backed up...

if I had a therapist I would have asked for a lexotanil prescription to calm down my sleep :)
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

Post by IneedHelp »

If you want to verify or test stuff in a safe manner, I suggest using VMWare virtual machines with disabled network adapters, no shared folders and no shared clipboard, otherwise infections can escape virtual environments just like they would spread on an unsecured network.
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

Post by pj »

IneedHelp wrote:If you want to verify or test stuff in a safe manner, I suggest using VMWare virtual machines with disabled network adapters, no shared folders and no shared clipboard, otherwise infections can escape virtual environments just like they would spread on an unsecured network.
Don't fall into the same "trap" I did. :roll:
nikos wrote:... sure enough last night I had yet another nightmare (as in bad dream)...
These are just nightmares from the unfathomable psyche of Nikos.
Nothing he mentioned is real. This same statement will sometimes also apply to his "solutions" to bug fix requests. :biggrin:

------------------------------------------
PJ in FL
Kilmatead
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

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pj wrote:Don't fall into the same "trap" I did.
Did you fall into a VM and become trapped in there too? You should have noticed that every cinema was showing The Matrix and taken that as a hint that something wasn't quite kosher and the universe was trying to give you a hint about how to save yourself. For example, if every cinema were showing On Golden Pond that just would have been the usual nightmare about ageing; "Jean de Florette" == nightmare of hunchbacks; "Any Given Sunday" == a world where Rugby has gone awry, etc.

Every waking moment is like that for me now. The last cogent moment I had was in 1982 and I was Bruce Boxleitner, giving Jeff Bridges a run for his money...
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

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Kilmatead wrote:... The last cogent moment I had was in 1982 and I was Bruce Boxleitner, giving Jeff Bridges a run for his money...
... when the MCP absorbed you and you've been trapped in the Nikos-verse ever since? Oh, sorry, that's "TRON-verse". Just similar in their sense of impending doom and frustrations.
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

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pj wrote:Just similar in their sense of impending doom and frustrations.
Tell me about it - if I'm still Bruce Boxleitner, what the heck happened to me after Babylon 5? I mean... I don't want to be an IMDB statistic! The Nikosverse is just a scary place where logic and reason just don't seem to ride on the same prevailing winds of ergonomic design... but that's relatively easy to deal with compared to the VM's where I wake up as Toshirô Mifune, or James Caan in that tollbooth.

The great thing about VM's is that you can just reset them and easily regain that false sense of security we all have when we're warm and safe under the duvet. If it weren't for my illusions, I could never get through the day.

One has to wonder how poor Nikos handles the pressure... so many bugs and feature requests (as if there was a difference), so little time...
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

Post by nikos »

get antivirus, get hacked more easily
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/11 ... antivirus/
division by zero!
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Re: blog: who needs antivirus?

Post by Kilmatead »

Not that Trend Micro is exactly an industry leader or anything. It's great when the lesser-players admit to their pointless existence. (Warning: Contains profanity, but since it's actually the real guy, that's what you get.)
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