Best PAID antivirus?

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Forticlient w/Fortigate Appliance is 'paid', giving you extensive advanded features like ATP Sandbox Scanning, etc. However one would have to know how to program and maintain a Fortigate.

Aside from that I would probably say Dr. Web.
 

jetman

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I've read heaps of AV testing results from various labs. I would say that Kaspersky and Norton have been consistently good over a number of years and these are the only two I would personally consider.

I accept that there are free products available, but in my view if you are not paying for the product then you ARE the product. Its worth paying for the best protection and its just part of the cost of running a computer. The same as you have to pay to maintain and insure a car every year.
 
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kamla5abi

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May 15, 2017
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If you have a good specs for your PC, I would recommend Bitdefender Total Security. Bitdefender is really good for ransomware. It has SAFE FILES to really protect from it and it has autopilot. If you turn on the activate profiles automatically, it is really great when you play games, watch movies and open file documents because it will adjust automatically for that profile to boost performance of your PC. If you find it a little bit heavy, it only means that you are protected. And most especially, you can find a lot of sales of Bitdefender licenses that you can buy at a very affordable price. Everything you need in a security suite is already in Bitdefender. Thank you. I do not know why others find it or even called it King of Bugs. Anyway, it is a personal preference.
I have a laptop that is a few years old, and Bitdefender Total security works perfectly fine on it. i7 4500u I think. It does sometimes take a bunch of RAM during manual scans, but from my experience it seems to take in proportion to how much total RAM you have. I've seen it take up to 500mb from vsserv file, but I upgraded RAM on that laptop to 12gb myself, plus RAM is meant to be used ;). I don't see the need to run manual scans daily. If you want to, schedule them during the night so it doesn't affect you. My BIOS time According to task manager is 2.7 seconds on that older laptop (also have mx300 SSD upgrade in it).

I purchased 1 year of BTS for about $23 I think on a sale promo. My thread should still be in the deals section somewhere, that site I linked to in my thread constantly has sales for Bitdefender and other companies too.

Note: please review the feature comparison between different versions from a company before you buy. Ex, maybe Bitdefender Internet Security would be good enough for you. Depending on how many devices, what OS, and which "extras" you want.
I guess I will quote myself the 10th time
"Kaspersky, Bitdefender, Norton, Emsisoft, you can't go wrong with either of these"

there are no best, there are top5 consistent ones like the ones mentioned
This is the truth. There is no "best of all" only what's best for your computer and setup. If you need one ASAP like I did, I found whichever of these 4 was the cheapest at the time and got it.
Any big name vendor is fine. But that should not be the only defense.
You need to have a multilayered approach to security.
You should install Ransomfree from cyberreason which is free by the way.
You also need a white-listing program / anti executable so that when you are using the PC there is less chance of driveby downloads and fileless malware.
This is good advice too. Multi later approach is "best" imo, whatever your preferred setup may be. But I don't mean multiple software that has the same purpose and workings. The multi layer approach we mean means different types of security software. Ex, Voodoo Shield is another software you should look into as another layer. And backup your important files somewhere, which remains offline until your backup process. Encrypted backups are equally useless as encrypted files on your computer.

Forticlient w/Fortigate Appliance is 'paid', giving you extensive advanded features like ATP Sandbox Scanning, etc. However one would have to know how to program and maintain a Fortigate.

Aside from that I would probably say Dr. Web.
Dr. Web? I've no experience with this program nor have I seen much testing for it. Your experience has been good with it? I've seen people say it's good for newer threats (what's in the wild now and recently) but not so great for older ones? Is that true?
Kasperksy>Bitdefender>Norton>Emsisoft
Norton is ranked lower because of its virus removal process sometimes gives "get help" option which is utter stupidity.
Lol! That is hilarious! I can't believe they actually do this hahah
Agreed again. That Get Help thing is just plain silly.
See above lol
I've read heaps of AV testing results from various labs. I would say that Kaspersky and Norton have been consistently good over a number of years and these are the only two I would personally consider.

I accept that there are free products available, but in my view if you are not paying for the product then you ARE the product. Its worth paying for the best protection and its just part of the cost of running a computer. The same as you have to pay to maintain and insure a car every year.
Imo take those AV lab tests with grainS of salt.
However, if you see some software continuously in the crappy half of these results from multiple labs, I would say that it's probably a pretty good idea to avoid those ;) (often people say we dunno how old the tested samples were etc, which is valid argument imo, but if we assume the samples are "old" and yet some software STILL has low scores consistently, then there is definitely a problem there imo ;)
 
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509322

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Best security soft is the one that works best for you on your personal system. Doesn't matter how it ranks in AV lab tests or if it is paid or free. If it works for you, you like it, and you will keep using it, then use it. That is a sound protection strategy. Don't play musical AV chair. Find something that you like and use it.

Most AVs\internet suites are decent, especially AV-C ones since AV-C has minimum requirements for vendor to participate. So all decent, some better than others. Start to split hairs to tell the practical difference between most of them.
 
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low L!fe

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Oct 11, 2014
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i recommend you ti buy norton
because use multi layers of protection and no problems with browsers
 
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ForgottenSeer 58943

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Best security soft is the one that works best for you on your personal system. Doesn't matter how it ranks in AV lab tests or if it is paid or free. If it works for you, you like it, and you will keep using it, then use it. That is a sound protection strategy. Don't play musical AV chair. Find something that you like and use it.

Most AVs\internet suites are decent, especially AV-C ones since AV-C has minimum requirements for vendor to participate. So all decent, some better than others. Start to split hairs to tell the practical difference between most of them.

Musical AV chairs as gotten me in the past.. Which is why I have so many unused licenses that come and go. Eventually I always find something that annoys me about one and I move on. Or it causes some conflict or too many false positives and I move on. What I don't tolerate is one that slows any aspect of my network or systems down or flags too many FP's.

I really miss the old days - AV's were AV's.. Not comprehensive suites. Cleanup tools. Backup systems. Startup improvers, etc.. I miss the likes of the original NOD32, F-Prot, RAV, etc.. Hopefully one day AV firms will get over their fascination with suites and bloat.
 
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Arequire

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I really miss the old days - AV's were AV's.. Not comprehensive suites. Cleanup tools. Backup systems. Startup improvers, etc.. I miss the likes of the original NOD32, F-Prot, RAV, etc.. Hopefully one day AV firms will get over their fascination with suites and bloat.
But think of all those junk files and folders just sat on your system compromising your security by... uh...
BUY OUR PREMIUM SECURITY SUITE AND RECLAIM 1.2GB OF SPACE ON YOUR HARD DRIVE TODAY!
we are not responsible for any damage that occurs to your system when using our built-in cleaner
 
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mlnevese

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I don't think a pure AV would be possible nowadays. Threats are not so simple as they used to be so behavior analysis and system monitoring are absolutely necessary... Disk defragmenters, cleaners etc. should not be a part of any protection suite though but if they do not impact on performance I don't mind having them there, although I will probably be using dedicated software for these tasks anyway.
 
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509322

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Musical AV chairs as gotten me in the past.. Which is why I have so many unused licenses that come and go. Eventually I always find something that annoys me about one and I move on. Or it causes some conflict or too many false positives and I move on. What I don't tolerate is one that slows any aspect of my network or systems down or flags too many FP's.

I really miss the old days - AV's were AV's.. Not comprehensive suites. Cleanup tools. Backup systems. Startup improvers, etc.. I miss the likes of the original NOD32, F-Prot, RAV, etc.. Hopefully one day AV firms will get over their fascination with suites and bloat.

False positives are blown out of proportion unless they just get to an absurd level. A 1 to 1.5 % false positive rate is reasonable. There are different types of false positives too - signature, reputation, behavioral, etc. Some will be more prevalent than others.
 
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Smoke

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I personally love Emsisoft ever since I started using it 2 or so years ago.
 
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ForgottenSeer 58943

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False positives are blown out of proportion unless they just get to an absurd level. A 1 to 1.5 % false positive rate is reasonable. There are different types of false positives too - signature, reputation, behavioral, etc. Some will be more prevalent than others.

FP's are blown out of proportion for a reason. If they happen in an corporate/enterprise environment they can cause great harm, confusion and at times, loss of productivity. Consider our MSP with 32K plus endpoints and what a 1-2% FP rate would do. I'd have to bring in additional techs tasked to just deal with FP's everyday. Also this could potentially damage or harm programs used by many businesses that are well known to trigger FP's because they aren't widely used solutions.

In the home environment it's less of a problem, but still a problem. When my kids have 22 game files quarantined by an AV in a couple of weeks it becomes a hassle because often those games need to be repaired to work again. If my wife hits a single FP it's the end of the world for her. I really don't have time to deal with them every day of the week. So for me, from a business AND home perspective, FP is a major consideration for any security product I will deploy in either situation.

Also FP's can cause angst with people and questions of 'do I allow this or not?', a boy who cried wolf.. I've noted that eventually some people don't trust the product with FP's and blindly bypass the recommendation or release things from quarantine. That degrades protection and presents a dangerous situation. For other folks it may not be a big deal.. For my personal system, it's not a big deal.
 
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509322

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FP's are blown out of proportion for a reason. If they happen in an corporate/enterprise environment they can cause great harm, confusion and at times, loss of productivity. Consider our MSP with 32K plus endpoints and what a 1-2% FP rate would do. I'd have to bring in additional techs tasked to just deal with FP's everyday. Also this could potentially damage or harm programs used by many businesses that are well known to trigger FP's because they aren't widely used solutions.

In the home environment it's less of a problem, but still a problem. When my kids have 22 game files quarantined by an AV in a couple of weeks it becomes a hassle because often those games need to be repaired to work again. If my wife hits a single FP it's the end of the world for her. I really don't have time to deal with them every day of the week. So for me, from a business AND home perspective, FP is a major consideration for any security product I will deploy in either situation.

Also FP's can cause angst with people and questions of 'do I allow this or not?', a boy who cried wolf.. I've noted that eventually some people don't trust the product with FP's and blindly bypass the recommendation or release things from quarantine. That degrades protection and presents a dangerous situation. For other folks it may not be a big deal.. For my personal system, it's not a big deal.

Enterprises are our primary customer base with consumers being comparatively small. We manage many tens of thousands of endpoints. And, the fact is, false positives are blown out of proportion.

A 1 to 2 % false positive rate is pretty much the industry average and it doesn't sink Enterprises.

If you are running Enterprise and installing AV and letting that AV simply do what it wants, then that's ENTIRELY on the Admin & management. Policies have to be carefully constructed and there needs to be monitoring. Install, "set-and-forget" = recent Webroot fiasco.
 
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ForgottenSeer 58943

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I can't in good conscience recommend Norton. Most of the worst infections we deal with are on systems with Norton installed. Case in point, one I am working on now (break fix customer) its astoundingly infected and Norton of course is humming right along telling them that they are safe. We do on average, as a company, 3,000-5,000 break-fix malware removals a year. Our managed clients this number shrinks down to only a few hundred because of the blended security and proper education combined with good management practices. But Norton/Symantec is a product we'd never recommend. Just my opinion.

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ForgottenSeer 58943

Thread author
Enterprises are our primary customer base with consumers being comparatively small. We manage many tens of thousands of endpoints. And, the fact is, false positives are blown out of proportion.

A 1 to 2 % false positive rate is pretty much the industry average and it doesn't sink Enterprises.

If you are running Enterprise and installing AV and letting that AV simply do what it wants, then that's ENTIRELY on the Admin & management. Policies have to be carefully constructed and there needs to be monitoring. Install, "set-and-forget" = recent Webroot fiasco.

2% wouldn't sink us in support calls and man hours but would be a substantial burden, anything higher could be catastrophic. But yes, in addition to a very low FP environment being a requirement for us we practice proactive whitelisting of known problem applications or potential conflicts. The folks up front get really angry when clients complain and man hours per client surpass what they feel is acceptable. :(
 
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