Competitive Information For Picking An Antivirus Solution

This is an article from a year ago that showed how each vendor was able to respond to key virus outbreaks.  They also show the data from the previous year.

I personally recommend F-Secure’s product.  The base product gives you everything you need for anti-spyware and malware and is inexpensive.  It is not a huge fat pig like some of the products out there (McAfee…)  I’ve heard from others who enjoy Kapersky as well, so either of those would be good choices and happen to both top this list.

I also personally got rid of McAfee products after a multitude of issues:

1. The product is seriously bloated and the Security Center product seems geard toward selling other products by McAfee than providing normal users with value.
2. Many of the products in the suite are not well integrated.  They often had their own installers and were a real pain to uninstall.
3. Lots of errors resulting in having to reinstall the product (without there being an easy way to do so).
4. Their website security is horrendous.  My wife forgot her password to their site so she used their “forgot my password” feature.  Guess what?  They emailed her, not a new random password, but her _actual password__  This from a security company!_  They either store passwords without encryption or store them with reversible encryption–both of which are seriously bad ideas and McAfee should know better.5. Their suite product line is very expensive and the price seems to go up every year.  They have since reworked their product line and it seems to be better now.
6. I read the F-Secure blog and can tell those guys really get security.
7. McAfee was the company with the poor QA that removed critical Office files to “protect” you and also mislabeled a legitmate ISP software program
8. McAfee products, like Symantec, have suffered from some local privilege escalation vulnerabilities or remote buffer overflows.  The cure is worse than the disease?

Ranking Response Times for Anti-Virus Programs - security Fix