Is Allchin right or plain crazy on the Vista anti-virus issue? Here's my story

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 11 November 2006 15:26

Your IT - Entertainment

And so, like my friend, who had also been infected with his system spewing out infected emails to his entire address book, I was infected too. I quickly realised what was going on, and emailed everyone in my address book to warn them of the problem, and to apologise for having sent them out a virus, and what to do if they had opened the attachment that was in the email. It’s not just Google and Apple that can make this error, eh?

Of course, I’ve never been fooled by this again, nor has any other social engineering trick worked on me to date. That’s because for experienced IT users, it’s easy to tell when an email contains a virus.

Obviously the everyday computer user can be easily fooled by the social engineering tricks that virus writers use to get you to open that attachment in an email, and that’s why we need an anti-virus program on our computers, to help protect us from ourselves.

But when my anti-virus on XP went kaput, I relied on my skill in seeing obvious and not so obvious email viruses and simply not opening them (or the attachments within them), I stayed away from websites that could contain malware (and was being protected by IE6 SP2, Windows Defender and manual scans with Spybot and AdAware) and guess what? Nothing happened. For months.

For those wondering if I was indeed infected without knowing it, well, besides the fact no emails were being sent out of my system in droves or other obvious signs of virus infection, the Trend Micro HouseCall online anti-virus scanning and removal system did indeed work on my system, and every now and then I’d check it to see what the score was.

It detected cookies here and there, but never any viruses or other malware.

Eventually, I decided it was time to do a complete re-installation, and of course once I’d taken this step, AVG re-installed itself perfectly and all was working again. Eventually I switched to Zone Alarm Internet Security 6.5 , and until I took the Vista RC1 plunge, it was my security system of choice, and one I’d happily recommend to anyone.

What would have happened had I opened one of the attachments in one of those social engineering emails? I’m sure I’d have been infected in a flash. But with an acute awareness of how they worked, and the fact that Outlook itself stops a lot of these viruses from being accessible (although not all), and the other protective software I used, I was able to run my system without anti-virus installed. So anyone running Vista, XP or anything else should definitely get an Internet Security program on their computers.

Do not do what Jim Allchin did with his son, or what I did with Windows XP. Even Allchin states that security threats are ongoing and that new threats will emerge in the future, even if he thinks Vista is the most secure Microsoft operating system ever.

After all, that’s what he said about Windows XP, and we know how that turned out.