antivirus (AVG) working or not?

[guest]

How do I know if my AVG antivirus program is working or not? I have been using it for years and never thought about it. Lately some people report having Trojan in some website which I browse. I used AVG to scan my computer and got nothing. Then I remember, for all these years, AVG has NEVER detected anything in my computer. Is this OK?

[Ledgem]

A long time ago there was a file made for situations like these: the EICAR test file (http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm) (link goes to the site where you can download the file and read more on it, not the download itself). It's basically a signature that all anti-virus and anti-malware vendors were supposed to recognize. It isn't a test to see how much your software can detect, but just to ensure that it's detecting things properly. Get that file and see if AVG detects it. According to some Google results, AVG should be able to detect the EICAR file as a threat.

Regarding the trojan in the websites that you browse, a common vector for viruses now is advertisements. Someone will infect an ad server and have it start serving viruses, or leading to sites with viruses or exploits. If you were blocking the ad server to begin with, you'd avoid that issue. Additionally, the ad server won't necessarily be displaying the infected "advertisement" all the time - you could have bypassed it by luck.

[sa547]

In an environment where flash disks have become wildly popular, AVG 8 is working like a charm... with mixed results.

The free (personal use only) version of AVG 8 included some mechanisms -- Search-Shield is only available -- to warn surfers whether the site he/she's about to enter is a potential threat. Furthermore it was able to detect some other trojans, especially those built for USB flash disks (but still can be circumvented because that AUTORUN.INF file is still being recognized by Windows unless one has to hack the registry to keep it from running).

But the effectiveness of any antivirus ultimately depends on the user: if it's being regularly used, blended with common sense (i.e. pressing on the left shift key while plugging in the flash disk or CD onto the drive to bypass AUTORUN), techniques and with some other utilities (except other antiviruses) to fight computer threats, you'll hardly get an infection.

[KholdStare]

Agreed. On my old computer, it's working absolutely fine with AVG, but I don't insert any unknown flash disks/CDs and don't go on any porn sites/sites with language I don't understand. If you just stick to Google, Yahoo, Animesuki, etc... without using Limewire and such, then it's not unusual to not get any infections.

And yes, I've heard of "bad" advertisements on big sites such as MySpace, but fortunately I don't go to it. I'm wondering if other big sites accidentally have these advertisements.

[Potatochobit]

avg is fine since its free, but it does give a lot of false positives. try looking up the hits on their website to see if its really a threat or not.

[WanderingKnight]

In an environment where flash disks have become wildly popular, AVG 8 is working like a charm.

Every flash drive-replicating virus that I found has been pretty harmless, or at least that's the sort of virus found around these parts. My sister has an annoying tendency to use her flash drive in every computer, and she's infected her machine a lot of times. The only way we knew of this was because the hidden binaries are perfectly transparent when I put the flash drive on my box (I run Linux), and her machine's running NOD32, I think (don't ask how my family acquired this... I'd have recommended them a free antivirus software, but honestly I know very little on the topic), but it's not up to date since that PC is not plugged to the net. But either way, it seemed not to do too much harm to the PC... but it's hard to know with Windows. For all I know, her machine could be rootkited and the OS running on a virtual environment *shrug*.

[sa547]

I rephrased the first sentence because anything can go wrong, such as yesterday when AV8 had mistaken Teracopy as a virus and removed it. ^^;

Yeah, every one of those disks I came across usually had their "leeches" picked out of them before I could open the drives.

Of course most of the flash-drive viruses are intended to scare the bejeezus out of most people, or, as one script kiddie who told me about why he made one and added, "to educate the users about computer security". So there's a thriving business among the blackhats in ripping off scared people with useless utilities.