Forum: Helpful Tools

I've been working with Avast since my days in the military. I was inspired by digital security measures and decided to run some experiments on my home machine, more or less testing the integrity of a number of antivirus engines. Avast was mentioned to me by my closest friend in service, so I tested it against every major retail antivirus on the market. Lo and behold Avast flagged hundreds of files the supposed best of the best couldn't see. I've run Norton, McAfee and Trend Micro engines . . . none of which came close to the Avast engine. What I found was that the free version of Avast was more powerful than every retailed antivirus on the market. I ran extensive tests wherein I purposefully infected myself just to see which scanners would pick up the virus, and Avast won every time, flagging the file, whereas I had other antivirus programs missing the file, saying it was clean. The results were clear: Avast Home surpasses the major retail antiviruses, and it's FREE! Everyone should have this scanner...

It's no longer just a virus. Yesteryear said it was spyware or adware, and now we're hearing about malware. The truth of it all is that it's all malware. Anything that maliciously alters your software or operating system is malware. That includes viruses and spyware and adware. Malware is the blanket term for "fuck my system." In reality malware's definition and execution differs from adware and spyware, even a virus. You can download for free or purchase a program that scans and removes spyware specifically, but it will ignore malware. Hell, a virus scanner can ignore malware. Although the term malware universally means any software that maliciously attacks a system, there are some particular behaviors most scanning programs overlook, such as rootkit activity. A rootkit is malware buried in admin folders, such as the Windows system32 folder, and designed to perform simple but devastating executions as if an administrator. We didn't call them rootkits back in the 90's, nor did we ever use the term...