Facebook Virus And Avast Anti-Virus
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To say that I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, would be a mild understatement. That being said, I have been watching in amazement as Facebook and MySpace both, allowed the malware issues to grow so out of hand, that both are literally having to sue their way out of the mess that I feel they created for themselves.
Then again, where does this leave us? If you are a Windows user (using Ubuntu here - so not a problem for me), chances are fair that you might become a target for the latest piece of nasty coming down the malware road known as “Koobface”. Apparently, Windows users can be targeted fairly easily and despite advanced users being able to see how obvious the exploit is as it happens, many others are simply not so lucky unfortunately.
Just when things were looking their most grim, I have been hearing rumors that Avast users remain largely unaffected as the anti-virus app blocks this type of attack out of the box. Not to say that other paid anti-viruses do not, but I would say Avast has a proven track record from what I understand. Others commenting on the link above appear to concur, which only leads me to believe there may be something to this rumor.
And so, this leads me to today’s big question: do you feel that your selected anti-virus (Windows users) is doing a decent enough job in protecting you from the latest malware threats? How about from web based threats coming from lax security on Facebook and MySpace? Hit the comments, share your perspective.
7 Comments
Clint Brothers
December 6th, 2008
at 12:57pm
I’m using Ubuntu Jaunty alpha1 and facebook is not a problem for me. It’s great to be virus immune, but I wonder how well CLAMWIN does against the latest attacks? If it’s Open Source it has to be good.
Matt Hartley
December 6th, 2008
at 6:36pm
Clint: I run a combo of 8.04 and 8.10 on multiple machines. As for using ClamAV (as ClamWin is the Windows version), it is a passive anti-virus tool.
Assuming ClamWin on Windows however, bundle it with Winpooch or better yet - check out this recent pieces at Intranet Journal.
Steven Churchill
December 6th, 2008
at 8:15pm
Facebook is not mentioning that infected machines also spawned SMTP engines and started to SPAM the entire world. The first variant started on Tuesday December 2nd, Facebook did not start to deal with the issue until Wednesday.
McAfee and TrendMirco did not have their defitions up to date to handle the virus until Wednesday afternoon.
Slowly getting off various Blacklists here, cause my company had to have access to Facebook (that tune is changing).
-=ChAoS=-
December 7th, 2008
at 10:02am
Well, I use both Windows (Vista and XP) and *NIX (Ubuntu, RHEL4&5, AIX and even OpenVMS). At work and at home, all my *NIX systems use Clam, and I have been very happy with that.
As for windows…..at work we use Symantec Endpoint. At home I use the Symantec Corp. client. And even then, I have to make regular HiJack This scans, and Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D.
And it’s still not enough.
I sandbox my browsers in windows.
And yet, it’s not enough. It takes 4 times as much work to keep windows SOMEWHAT clean as keeping *NIX perfectly clean. IF it was possible, I would walk away from windows totally. I’m not a zealot that says windows has nothing positive and all Redmond products are evil. But the spyware/adware/malware threat is insane! I am the lead *NIX sysadmin at work, and I watch the windows dudes spend almost ALL their admin time dealing with spy/ad/malware issues. That’s just nuts.
Facebook BlackBerry ~ Windows Fanatics
December 8th, 2008
at 3:23pm
[...] Have you gotten a virus from Facebook or MySpace? [...]
squirejoe
December 9th, 2008
at 5:24am
I use Avast, and it has stopped things that my work computer running Symantec End Point has let threw.
When I first looked at Avast, I was looking for an open source AV, and narrowed it down to about 3. The reason I went with Avast is because I was on a Pirate kick at the time and thought it was a cool name. Not the best way to decide on something, but I also had a clean image of my computer and if the current install got infected, I could recover in about 2 hours total
Now I recommend Avast to all my friends.
Curtis
August 6th, 2009
at 6:36am
I worked IT on a college campus for the last 4 years. I have seen the spyware, virus and scam-ware progress over the years and along with them anti-virus programs. Do to budget constraints and being a lowly student I was forced to use mostly free software. As of this spring my anti-virus cleaning kit consisted of Avast!, Super Anti-Spyware and Spywarebot S&D. With these three tools I was able to clean probably 90% of the machines completely. Avast! was the key to the cleaning process. It has a bootable scan tool to remove those really dug-in problems. I now run avast home on all of my home machines and recomend it everytime I clean off a computer.