What is the best Antivirus/Firewall suite available Currently?

[tru23nyte]

I've gotten out of touch with the times and am in the dark when it comes to the best suite available for this year. If anyone knows knowledge on the subject and can refer me to a secure program, gracias! Money is not an issue but Quality is. Thanks again ^^

[tehboris]

They are all pretty bad. the best way to not get your computer infected is to not be an idiot on the internet.

[tokenuser]

The Antivirus debate is almost religious.

The firewall one is a lot easier.

USE THE ONE IN YOUR ROUTER. Hardware firewalls are far more effective than anything you will have on a local computer.

If you must have a backup, the default Windows firewall is fine.

[kzap]

I've gotten out of touch with the times and am in the dark when it comes to the best suite available for this year. If anyone knows knowledge on the subject and can refer me to a secure program, gracias! Money is not an issue but Quality is. Thanks again ^^
It's called Linux, on a serious note I know a lot of people who love Norton but I've never tried it (don't need to :D) I also agree that if you want to be really secure you would want a good quality router with a firewall.
If it is just for web browsing you should consider Linux (duel boot) worst case scenario if somehow something does effect your computer you just lost that partition that you were only using for browsing.

[rabidbadger]

I've gotten out of touch with the times and am in the dark when it comes to the best suite available for this year. If anyone knows knowledge on the subject and can refer me to a secure program, gracias! Money is not an issue but Quality is. Thanks again ^^

Dance the Security Tango! (http://securitytango.com/) All free, all tried, true and trusted. A great "suite" put together by the fine folks at soundbytes.org, (http://soundbytes.org/index.php) the longest running "computer user group" on the air.

[computoman]

MORE than one user at a time can access your computer at a time. That means you machine can be accessed more easily than using the system keyboard. Most people do not realize this. That is especially ture where wireless networking is used. The biggest problem I see on systems is that the adminstrator as well as other user acccount passwords are left blank or are so simple that it can be easily figured out. It is like having the front door locked and the backdoor left wide open. No virus protection software can protect against that. Someone can get into your system with out using the keyboard. They can log in remotely via the internet or on a local network. Over 90 percent of the machines I clean for viruses and ohter malware have this problem. The second biggest problem is that people want to operate their computer with system administrator or root power, A carefully crafted web app can take advantage of this. When accessing the internet, I use the lowest user security level possible to avoid those issues. There is software to do priviledge escalation, but at least you can limit it without just leaving the back door open.

There is more than one kind of firewall. You really need at least two kinds of firewalls. One for programs that try to defeat the firewall and a second that is a packet filter to stop application malware that tries to take advantage of your browser and the like. Even Cisco realizes the latter may be a bigger threat and have upgraded their firewalls accordingly. The big term now is sandboxing where you operate a software in it's own environment. That way if there was a breach, only the sand box would be affectd an not the whole system. The BSD's have been doing that for a long time. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the other BSD's when properly set up are probably the most secure on the average operating systems. Firewalls will have to become more and more sophisticated until people learn how to behave on the internet.

What is the best firewall? There is no panacea per se. But you can protect your self by using a nat box (most of the common routers provide that) where you local machines are on non-routable addresses. You may want to also have a content or packet filer to examine data as it comes into the network to weed out malicious traffic before it gets to your machine to have to deal with. Using that old computer to install ipcop and or the like is even a better idea than just using a nat box and local software firewall to do the packet filtering on a machine no matter what operating system you are using, Your firewall should also be able to disreguard traffic from sites known to be trouble makers. That is why a lot of corporate environments use proxy servers. Last of all you must remain vigilant as to what threats are being used, so that your system can stay up to date to void these threats. Smart internet use is part of that process also. Limit root access!!!!! Use complicated passwords and change them often enough. That also means you also need to close the ports and or back doors to your routers and local machines that are not essential. Ask your computer guru for more details.

Lastly, you should test your firewalls regularly to be sure they are doing the job effectively. Sometimes this is known as a penetration testing. It would not hurt to do it with even home systems. Also check to see what is connected to your network, If there is a strange device or some new device (aka the the interceptor) attached to your network, you might have a problem that needs to be addressed immediately. There is a variety of software available,to do penetration testing and to identify equipment on the network, but it is usually best left to people who are trustworthy and knowledgedable in this area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(networking)

After thought:
Linux can be when properly setup can be more secure than proprietary operating systems, but the fact is traditionally they have not been a target, But that is beginning to change as the world becomes more computer savvy. Computing by obscurity has always been the best defense.

[jafer]

I agree with computomon. First to protect and hide yourself from the internet using a stateful packet inspection router with Natting functionality. Then to add another layer of defence on you computer itself. For me Windows firewalls aren't good enough because they do not give you outbound protection (well not by default anyway and it's a mission to setup and keep on top of). Outbound protection is needed if you have a virus that is trying to phone home, or in other words attempting to send back your data to the criminal.

Vendors like Symantec, ZoneAlarm, Kaspersky are clever enough to build a list of your safe programs, and to block everything else on your computer.

I actually wrote a detailed article on this if anyone is looking for a true firewall (Not just Natting and SPI but looking inside the packets in real time for malicious threats - http://www.internet-computer-security.com/Firewall/Which-Network-Firewall.html

Jafer

[shyronnie]

How do you know if your router has a firewall? We have the AT&T Uverse router on which the phone and the TV are also connected.

[tehboris]

How do you know if your router has a firewall? We have the AT&T Uverse router on which the phone and the TV are also connected.

All NAT routers are quasi firewalls purely because the NAT prevents computers on the internet establishing connections with computer behind the router.

[shyronnie]

All NAT routers are quasi firewalls purely because the NAT prevents computers on the internet establishing connections with computer behind the router.

So does AT&T use that NAT router?

[tehboris]

Any consumer grade router you will buy is a NAT router.

[shyronnie]

Oh. So I guess that means that any router you buy has some kind of firewall? And if that's the case, is it a strong enough firewall, or do people still have to make the router extra protected? I don't think my apartment neighbors are professional hackers.

[tehboris]

I think you are talking about wireless networks now.

Have you enabled encyption on the network?

[shyronnie]

Well I checked, and it has this TKIP encryption type. But I haven't done any encryption myself. And we also have the WPA security type.

[shyronnie]

WTF?? I think we got a spambot in the house.

[goinggreen]

I always use MAC address filtering for my WIFI in home.
This will give you another level of security...Only the device with specific MAC address will be able to connect to your home wirless network. I also do not broadcat the SSID.

[shyronnie]

I always use MAC address filtering for my WIFI in home.
This will give you another level of security...Only the device with specific MAC address will be able to connect to your home wirless network. I also do not broadcat the SSID.

iPhones have MAC addresses too, right? This kind of security sounds very handy. Now I need to figure out how to turn it on for my AT&T Uverse router.

[roashru]

upgrade the operating system to something that dose administrators and users. then find an anti-virus that monitors network traffic well.

[tehboris]

I always use MAC address filtering for my WIFI in home.
This will give you another level of security...Only the device with specific MAC address will be able to connect to your home wirless network. I also do not broadcat the SSID.

If you have WPA encryption enabled with a good password, mac address filtering and disabling SSID broadcasting is mostly superfluous.

[goinggreen]

It is just another level of security... you CAN not be 100% secure.

[tehboris]

It is just another level of security... you CAN not be 100% secure.

Ye, and not broadcasting a SSID and enabling mac filtering is defeated in about 10 minuets compared to WPA which requires a few hundred years (say, it probably takes longer) of trying with a brute force attack.