[MACEP] McAfee Anti-Virus

[Eric Harrison]

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Mike Ely wrote:

> Thomas,
>
> You might want to consider other brands.  I've had some unpleasant experiences 
> with McAfee, and Norton is just a big fat pig where system resources are 
> concerned.  I've had good experience with F-Prot, and I'm sure readers here 
> have other brands as well that they like.
>
> Cheers,
> Mike

I'll toss in 2 bytes on a non McAfee/Norton scanner I just started using...


I use the McAfee unix command line scanner to filter all of our inbound &
outbound email. Due to a self-inflicted problem with McAfee, on Monday I
temporarily switched over to using ClamAV (http://www.clamav.net/). 
I noted that ClamAV didn't require significant resources, so I kept it
running in series with the McAfee scanner.

After three days, I'm so-far impressed with ClamAV. Out of the 2,500
virus quarantined per day, ClamAV detects every single one that
McAfee does and a couple phishing scam emails to boot. Neither ClamAV
nor McAfee had a false-positive.

I've had a couple of people tell me today that they switched over to
ClamAV on their home Windows machines and are quite happy with it.

It is also free (GPL) and so are the automatically updated virus
signature updates. It runs on a number of platforms including Windows,
OSX, Linux, Solaris, *BSD, AIX, and BeOS.

On the flip side, it is a fairly young piece of software. The current
version is 0.84.

-Eric

> Thomas Glover wrote:
>> Until recently I had been using Norton on our home PCs; however, we had a 
>> difficulty with the recent version and have decided to try McAfee (?).
>> 
>> Questions: 1. Thoughts about McAfee versus Norton (we run one machine on Win 
>> 98 and the other on XP)?
>> 
>> 2. I use Firefox as my day-to-day browser; when I tried to download McAfee I 
>> got an message saying that it, McAfee, worked with IE and to open IE. I can 
>> understand that one may need IE to download McAfee, but does that mean once 
>> installed it ONLY works when using IE? Or, that it will not work with 
>> Firefox?
>> 
>> 3. When I tired to call McAFee I got a recording saying that the number was 
>> no longer in service. ??
>> 
>> Thanks for any info./assistance.
>> 
>> Thomas Glover


-- 
Eric Harrison
Technology Services
Multnomah Education Service District
(503)257-1554    cell: (971)998-6249