I try to avoid doing business with people or entities I don't trust, and this would fall into that category. As does any software (like latter day Windows) that likes to "phone home" a lot to make reports, or possibly harvest info they can sell. I am shutting the door on these as much as possible, even taking a look at things like the Epic Privacy Browser. This also tends to rule out a lot of software from Chinese companies, a lot of which proliferates under multiple brand names but which is all really under the same corporate umbrella. If they won't tell you who they really are or where to find them, that's a trust issue in itself. By no means are they the only ones who do this, but they are known for it.
When it comes to AV there are only a few options that are free, if that matters. I used AVG for a number of years, until too frequent false positives and some disastrous program updates sent me packing. I currently use Avast! on most of my computers, and it has generally been satisfactory. The free version of MalwareBytes is there as an available "second opinion", but does not function on-access (running all the time, monitoring for suspected problems) , but rather only on-demand. I think it may be designed not to conflict with your main on-access AV program anyway, but this assures it. I don't think it would make a sufficient "primary", on its own. Although generally well-behaved, Avast! has needed a fair amount of rule "exclusions" here, which don't always survive program updates intact, and so need to be reset. There are occasions where I have to turn the program off for some brief interval, because it gets overzealous and is interfering with standard operations.
I recently started trying out Avira on one machine, and the jury is still out on that. I've been having intermittent boot failure issues on that rig, requiring the too optimistically named "Windows Startup Repair" or, more often, a Safe Boot to Last Known Good Profile. My thought was that this was likely due to one of the bad MS Updates that come through periodically, but the last time this happened the only thing that had changed on the system was an Avira update. Probably just a coincidence, but I'm keeping watch on this.
There are some who say that antivirus programs are reactive -- too late -- and can't offer enough protection heading off an incursion. In cases like the recent "WannaCry" and some variants, that is probably true, but that was an OS-level deficiency. I have to take the position that any decent AV is better than nothing. You **still** (also) need regular boot partition image backups though, in case you run into a situation where you are forced to "roll back the clock."
For analyzing particular files (and even questionable websites), I think
https://www.virustotal.com/ remains a great resource, with certain provisos. They recently doubled their maximum file size accepted for analysis from 128M to 256M. That was overdue. Not all of their reporting scanners deserve the same respect: some of them are major names, others are negligible. They do generate a fair proportion of almost-certain false positives -- particularly when it is a portable program that is being analyzed. (See the long held complaints of many vendors like NirSoft and the SysInternals suite developers.) If VT scores a given file something like
7 / 59, and I've barely heard of 4 or 5 of the 7 giving the thumbs down, I'm inclined to think that item was safe.
Jordan
From: Lynn Brenner
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, September 5, 2017 5:51 AM
Subject: OT: Kaspersky anti-virus software
What do you guys think? Should the average consumer abandon Kaspersky? And if so, what's the optimal alternative?
Lynn Brenner