• Just installed Free Panda AV with Win XP Pro

    From corky@here.now.com@21:1/5 to All on Tue Nov 1 20:02:46 2022
    It ran through almost 10,000 files on my C: and came up clean with no
    baddies. I was worried it might come up with a lot of false alarms.
    Can't believe the thing didn't. That's one of the reasons I left the
    paid-for AVs some years back.

    Got it at Cnet.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul@21:1/5 to corky@here.now.com on Tue Nov 1 22:29:34 2022
    On 11/1/2022 10:02 PM, corky@here.now.com wrote:
    It ran through almost 10,000 files on my C: and came up clean with no baddies. I was worried it might come up with a lot of false alarms.
    Can't believe the thing didn't. That's one of the reasons I left the paid-for AVs some years back.

    Got it at Cnet.


    You should salt at least one EICAR on the disk.

    A text file with the EICAR character sequence in it.

    You can open notepad, and copy in the string.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

    Or better still, get the string from the following Malwarebytes article.

    *******

    "Why doesn’t Malwarebytes detect EICAR?"

    https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/191650-malwarebytes-3-frequently-asked-questions/

    There are some AV products, that "think they are working",
    and don't detect EICAR or anything else. I happen to believe
    it does have value to salt a disk, and mainly because there is no such
    thing as rock bottom in the AV industry. I tested one utility, that
    definitely did nothing (the disk light did not blink), and
    it did not detect EICAR. There were some weird messages in its
    console, like the poor thing was lost.

    You could also put your EICAR file inside a ZIP file, and it
    should still be detected inside there.

    *******

    If you want to test Windows Defender in Win10 or Win11, try
    and download ProduKey and watch what happens :-) Microsoft
    calls the executable "Hackerware", because it displays
    the license key from the C: drive. Big deal. Defender will then offer
    to quarantine the file.

    https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

    Other AV products are unlikely to react at all to that one.

    *******

    Some utilities have a problem with scanning archive (ZIP-like) files.

    There are programs that say right in the documentation "this
    utility can only scan to a depth of 13 folders" or similar words.
    There should always be a path length limit, but it's a surprise
    when you experience a scanner crash, just because you had the
    Firefox tarball in your Downloads folder.

    http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/106.0.3/source/

    firefox-106.0.3.source.tar.xz 479MB 30-Oct-2022 19:18

    You don't have to do that, unless you're bored :-) I was kinda
    surprised when a well regarded AV crashed while scanning that.
    It meant I had to move all my tarballs, out of the Downloads
    folder and onto another partition. So that a scan of C: could
    finish without crashing. The XZ in that example, is a compressor
    (it has a higher compression ratio than ZIP does).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils

    Paul

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From gk@nothere.org@21:1/5 to Paul on Wed Nov 2 00:34:50 2022
    On Tue, 1 Nov 2022 22:29:34 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

    On 11/1/2022 10:02 PM, corky@here.now.com wrote:
    It ran through almost 10,000 files on my C: and came up clean with no
    baddies. I was worried it might come up with a lot of false alarms.
    Can't believe the thing didn't. That's one of the reasons I left the
    paid-for AVs some years back.

    Got it at Cnet.


    You should salt at least one EICAR on the disk.

    A text file with the EICAR character sequence in it.

    You can open notepad, and copy in the string.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

    Or better still, get the string from the following Malwarebytes article.

    *******

    "Why doesn’t Malwarebytes detect EICAR?"

    https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/191650-malwarebytes-3-frequently-asked-questions/

    There are some AV products, that "think they are working",
    and don't detect EICAR or anything else. I happen to believe
    it does have value to salt a disk, and mainly because there is no such
    thing as rock bottom in the AV industry. I tested one utility, that >definitely did nothing (the disk light did not blink), and
    it did not detect EICAR. There were some weird messages in its
    console, like the poor thing was lost.

    You could also put your EICAR file inside a ZIP file, and it
    should still be detected inside there.

    *******

    If you want to test Windows Defender in Win10 or Win11, try
    and download ProduKey and watch what happens :-) Microsoft
    calls the executable "Hackerware", because it displays
    the license key from the C: drive. Big deal. Defender will then offer
    to quarantine the file.

    https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

    Other AV products are unlikely to react at all to that one.

    *******

    Some utilities have a problem with scanning archive (ZIP-like) files.

    There are programs that say right in the documentation "this
    utility can only scan to a depth of 13 folders" or similar words.
    There should always be a path length limit, but it's a surprise
    when you experience a scanner crash, just because you had the
    Firefox tarball in your Downloads folder.

    http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/106.0.3/source/

    firefox-106.0.3.source.tar.xz 479MB 30-Oct-2022 19:18

    You don't have to do that, unless you're bored :-) I was kinda
    surprised when a well regarded AV crashed while scanning that.
    It meant I had to move all my tarballs, out of the Downloads
    folder and onto another partition. So that a scan of C: could
    finish without crashing. The XZ in that example, is a compressor
    (it has a higher compression ratio than ZIP does).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils

    Paul


    I placed an Eicar txt file in windows sys32 and Panda found it.

    It says it deleted the original and sent a copy to quarantine.

    It's been so long since I used an AV product I never considered the
    dang things wouldn't find even an Eicar file.

    I don't use AVs. I use a virtual type thingy to keep bad stuff off my
    C: I just got bored and curious, and that's usually when we screw
    something up. : o)

    Panda is still running. It's over 90,000 files at the moment. I'm
    gonna just let it go and do it's thing and see what happens.

    Good Grief! It's jumped from my C: to my external E: hard drive!

    I had to stop it. I have lots of Warez stuff from decades ago on that
    drive. Stuff I really never used and has never been AV tested even
    with VirusTotal. I don't want Panda screwing around in there. If I
    decided I want to try one of those files, I'd run it through
    VirusTotal first. Panda would have a ball scanning through all those
    keygens and cracks. : o)

    I ran it again after placing an Eicar zip into Program Files. It
    found it.

    So far, it seems to working pretty good for a freebie. Don't quite
    know what I'm doing with it yet, though. As I said, I really didn't
    need it, but it's a new toy. : o)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From corky@here.now.com@21:1/5 to gk@nothere.org on Wed Nov 2 01:35:54 2022
    On Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:34:50 -0600, gk@nothere.org wrote:

    On Tue, 1 Nov 2022 22:29:34 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

    On 11/1/2022 10:02 PM, corky@here.now.com wrote:
    It ran through almost 10,000 files on my C: and came up clean with no
    baddies. I was worried it might come up with a lot of false alarms.
    Can't believe the thing didn't. That's one of the reasons I left the
    paid-for AVs some years back.

    Got it at Cnet.


    You should salt at least one EICAR on the disk.

    A text file with the EICAR character sequence in it.

    You can open notepad, and copy in the string.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

    Or better still, get the string from the following Malwarebytes article.

    *******

    "Why doesn’t Malwarebytes detect EICAR?"

    https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/191650-malwarebytes-3-frequently-asked-questions/

    There are some AV products, that "think they are working",
    and don't detect EICAR or anything else. I happen to believe
    it does have value to salt a disk, and mainly because there is no such >>thing as rock bottom in the AV industry. I tested one utility, that >>definitely did nothing (the disk light did not blink), and
    it did not detect EICAR. There were some weird messages in its
    console, like the poor thing was lost.

    You could also put your EICAR file inside a ZIP file, and it
    should still be detected inside there.

    *******

    If you want to test Windows Defender in Win10 or Win11, try
    and download ProduKey and watch what happens :-) Microsoft
    calls the executable "Hackerware", because it displays
    the license key from the C: drive. Big deal. Defender will then offer
    to quarantine the file.

    https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

    Other AV products are unlikely to react at all to that one.

    *******

    Some utilities have a problem with scanning archive (ZIP-like) files.

    There are programs that say right in the documentation "this
    utility can only scan to a depth of 13 folders" or similar words.
    There should always be a path length limit, but it's a surprise
    when you experience a scanner crash, just because you had the
    Firefox tarball in your Downloads folder.

    http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/106.0.3/source/

    firefox-106.0.3.source.tar.xz 479MB 30-Oct-2022 19:18

    You don't have to do that, unless you're bored :-) I was kinda
    surprised when a well regarded AV crashed while scanning that.
    It meant I had to move all my tarballs, out of the Downloads
    folder and onto another partition. So that a scan of C: could
    finish without crashing. The XZ in that example, is a compressor
    (it has a higher compression ratio than ZIP does).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils

    Paul


    I placed an Eicar txt file in windows sys32 and Panda found it.

    It says it deleted the original and sent a copy to quarantine.

    It's been so long since I used an AV product I never considered the
    dang things wouldn't find even an Eicar file.

    I don't use AVs. I use a virtual type thingy to keep bad stuff off my
    C: I just got bored and curious, and that's usually when we screw
    something up. : o)

    Panda is still running. It's over 90,000 files at the moment. I'm
    gonna just let it go and do it's thing and see what happens.

    Good Grief! It's jumped from my C: to my external E: hard drive!

    I had to stop it. I have lots of Warez stuff from decades ago on that
    drive. Stuff I really never used and has never been AV tested even
    with VirusTotal. I don't want Panda screwing around in there. If I
    decided I want to try one of those files, I'd run it through
    VirusTotal first. Panda would have a ball scanning through all those
    keygens and cracks. : o)

    I ran it again after placing an Eicar zip into Program Files. It
    found it.

    So far, it seems to working pretty good for a freebie. Don't quite
    know what I'm doing with it yet, though. As I said, I really didn't
    need it, but it's a new toy. : o)

    gk post was from me, corky. Screwed up. Used the wrong news
    reeader/poster. ; o(

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Pamela@21:1/5 to corky@here.now.com on Wed Nov 2 20:21:07 2022
    On 07:35 2 Nov 2022, corky@here.now.com said:


    I placed an Eicar txt file in windows sys32 and Panda found it.

    It says it deleted the original and sent a copy to quarantine.

    It's been so long since I used an AV product I never considered the
    dang things wouldn't find even an Eicar file.

    I don't use AVs. I use a virtual type thingy to keep bad stuff off
    my C: I just got bored and curious, and that's usually when we screw >>something up. : o)

    Panda is still running. It's over 90,000 files at the moment. I'm
    gonna just let it go and do it's thing and see what happens.

    Good Grief! It's jumped from my C: to my external E: hard drive!

    I had to stop it. I have lots of Warez stuff from decades ago on
    that drive. Stuff I really never used and has never been AV tested
    even with VirusTotal. I don't want Panda screwing around in there.
    If I decided I want to try one of those files, I'd run it through >>VirusTotal first. Panda would have a ball scanning through all those >>keygens and cracks. : o)

    I ran it again after placing an Eicar zip into Program Files. It
    found it.

    So far, it seems to working pretty good for a freebie. Don't quite
    know what I'm doing with it yet, though. As I said, I really didn't
    need it, but it's a new toy. : o)

    gk post was from me, corky. Screwed up. Used the wrong news
    reeader/poster. ; o(

    PC Mag has several reservations about Free Panda AV which you may be
    interested in:

    https://uk.pcmag.com/antivirus/35064/panda-free-antivirus

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Mayayana@21:1/5 to Pamela on Thu Nov 3 08:03:16 2022
    "Pamela" <pamela.private.mailbox@gmail.com> wrote

    | PC Mag has several reservations about Free Panda AV which you may be
    | interested in:
    |
    | https://uk.pcmag.com/antivirus/35064/panda-free-antivirus
    |

    Personally I wouldn't want AV trying to do all those
    extra things. It's AV. People want it to save them from
    having to think about anything. Corky has expressed
    that himself. He can't be bothered to understand it or
    deal with it.

    AV software providing VPN? No, thanks. And why does
    no one mention "cloud". Obviously this kind of software
    is not running remotely. But what "cloud-based" means is
    that the program will be connecting remotely while running.
    Why would anyone want that? If you care about security
    then why allow access to your entire system to a software
    company? There are non-cloud AV programs.

    Between that and the VPN, a company like Panda could
    be making a lot of money selling personal data. And what if
    the company gets hacked? You've given them a backdoor
    key to the city, so you share whatever risk their servers
    have.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)