Originally Posted by
k1w1mike
I've worked in the security space for about 3 years now, sure its not a huge ammount of time but its enough for me to know the current status.
I would personally recommend you save the money from antivirus software and buy or build a router/firewall with a signature and IDS built in, Sophos for example offers an XG firewall home edition which is good.
And IPFire have an easy setup and make it easy to configure the IPsec firewall which can be tedious doing it via command line, luckily they give you a gui.
In terms of raw antivirus software, i choose Norton. It's not the best, its not the worst its a jack of all trades and master of none. Saying that, it's stable. More stable and more compatible than the other two. It's used worldwide for a lot of enterprises and businesses so it's got to be stable.
Kaspersky and Bitdefender also must be stable but they aren't as stable as Norton is.
I currently use Sophos for my systems and my family's systems for the simple fact it's stable and it works. Antivirus isn't going to protect you from a complex attack, a targetted attack or anything likewise but it will protect you from the common stuff that is around like adware, spyware and worms, some rootkits, some botnets etc.
I actually work for AVG. And what I will say is that the product is very advanced in depth, people say its not but it actually is.
There is an emulator that runs every program unknown inside an emulator (pretty much a sandbox) and analyzes it's behaviour which is called the Identity protection module.
It's called identity protection because the emulator isolates the program from the rest of the system, meaning if the unknown software is spyware or something like it and it gets found to be malicious it will be blocked and no harm is done to critical system files.
It is possible to bypass this as with all antiviruses.
And yes it is worth getting a paid antivirus but only if you need stability and need protection better than free software. I use free Sophos Home, home.sophos.com because it provides you with a basic management console, a good antivirus with great signatures and it runs REALLY stable.