Ask HN: What antivirus software do you use? Recently I got my hands on a new laptop and during the initiation process, I got to the part of which antivirus software to use. Which one do you use and why? Have you considered or tried any open source ones as ClamAV or Open AntiVirus Project? |
In all seriousness though: without knowing anything about state of the art AV software I question how effective even big brand software is without compromising your own operating system integrity these days.
Whenever I encountered cases of an infected system in the last 5 years or so it was nothing regular AV software could have caught anyway. Specific tools had to be downloaded for removal and if you put this in contrast to the annoying number of false positives you start to question the effectiveness. I imagine all of this is of course highly subjective.
If you want to run AV, check if your OS already has one (Windows Defender is standard on Windows and Mac has its own AV product and firewall). Turn those on. Avoid ClamAV, it has a lot of false positives, usually on something important.
That being said, I run ComboFix + ADWCleaner + RKill + JunkwareRemovalTool every few weeks to remove any malware that may have creeped in.
Just doing dev work on Linux and also Thinking before clicking(TM)? Probably CommonSense2018(C) will be enough.
Keep in mind that AV software also runs as very high authority on a system, and they all had serious vulnerabilities, annoying popups, etc.
A lying DNS + IP blacklist could also help protect you. see for UNIX-like systems e.g. https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/blackhole & https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/lie-to-me
All big commercial names are sufficient; just not at keeping nation states out of your machine.
Nothing on Windows 10 -- Just Defender, which comes as part of Windows 10.