Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Norton vs. Malwarebytes

We have Norton Antivirus 2009 on our pc (Windows with all the security updates). When I opened up explorer yesterday, it started wigging out. So I ran a full scan on all drives using Norton. Nothing... No infected files. Just a little old tracking cookie, which I diligently deleted.

That didn't seem right, so I did a little digging and found and installed a free anti-spyware program, Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware. It found three infected files - two hotkeys and one bad-sounding little *$!?# called backdoor.bot.

Removed them, but now it has me wondering how good Norton really is. My internet behavior is pretty non-risky -- google news, etsy, a few blogspot websites, flickr, the library, and occasionally twitter. (Wish I had to visit paypal more!) I do google search, but I'm pretty careful about what I click on. Philip may be a little more adventurous, but not much. I used to use spybot to catch spyware, but I hear that's not as good anymore.

I'm not sure we'll renew with Norton when the time comes around again. I've been reading others with pretty much the same comment. Maybe we'll check out AVG. At any rate, malwarebytes is a handy little free download that so far seems to work pretty well.

2 comments:

Megan said...

Thanks so much, I've been looking for a free anti-malware device. All the "free" ones I found would find the problems for free but wouldn't remove them until you paid up.
Thanks for suggesting this one, I'll check it out!

Andrea said...

Great! Hope it works as well for you as it did for me.