Kaspersky Alternates

[Ed P]

The time has come to dump Kaspersky and look for a neutral AV-Vendor.

e.g F-Secure (Finland)

ESET (Slovakia)

Panda (Spanish)

Avira (German)

I suspect that German or Finish companies would be more likely to respect privacy but does anyone have an opinion on this. (Maybe just dump the lot and rely on Windows Defender!)

[JayCeeDee]

What brought this to the fore, Ed, PC problems or political conflicts??

I ask because I have been considering the same thing recently as Kaspersky has just become irritating . They did a very good background job of protecting my PC for some years now, but recently it has been telling me that there is a conflict with Malwarebytes ( I run the premium version ) and every time I log in to a website the ‘Kaspersky Key’ flashes and asks if I want to save the password, despite my having LastPass.

I did however drop the ball on that and, annoyingly, Kaspersky has just renewed for another year.

[Ed P]

Politics, and a thought that the Russians may be tempted to use Kaspersky as a botnet/DDOS point against UK interests.

[Ed P]

Having done a little more research the choice seems to me to be between F-Secure (Finland) and Bitdefender(Romania). The latter is edging it a little as it is on sale and includes a Child Protection module. (useful for visiting male grandchildren {9 coming on 19}!). I guess I’ll make my jump tomorrow so if anyone has input I’ll happily take it.

[Ed P]

@Jay Cee Dee, I noted you said you had TWO A/V programs running. Most ‘experts’ say it is bad practice to do that as it gains little and risks clashes/slowdowns. It might be an idea just to do a clean uninstall on the Kaspersky one.

[JayCeeDee]

Ed P wrote:

@Jay Cee Dee, I noted you said you had TWO A/V programs running. Most ‘experts’ say it is bad practice to do that as it gains little and risks clashes/slowdowns. It might be an idea just to do a clean uninstall on the Kaspersky one.

I suppose you’re right – well you are.🙃😁 My problem has been that, coming through the 80’s/90’s on my PC journey, people had two separate programmes – in my case AVG and Spybot S&D – as an a/v that did a good job with viruses, didn’t do so well on spyware/ rootkits and vice-versa. Then MSE came along and was better with viruses but still not so hot on spyware, so I paired it with Malwarebytes Free. I then replaced MSE with Kaspersky ( courtesy of Barclays ) when I started online banking and upgraded MWB to Premium.

Apart from an occasional balk this has worked for me without any noticeable slowdowns or problems – until KIS started getting picky. Principles ( and the bonus of losing the odd annoyance ) tells me to jettison KIS, but I’ve always weighed the practical against the principle and have mostly avoided shooting myself in the foot or cutting off my own nose to spite my face!!! I think I’ll get the NAS setup before I remove KIS so that I keep myself covered.

[Ed P]

Well I made my decision, Bitdefender it is (5 seats on Amazon for £19.99). Now to try and get rid of Kaspersky!

[Ed P]

The removal of Kaspersky was easy, and gave me a political opportunity to inform Kaspersky that the could improve their product by telling Putin to stop his illegal war on Ukraine!

The one thing I really did not like about Bitdefender was their automatic renewal. This is something I always avoid as it is often higher than street price. So next February I need to remember to opt out of their auto renewal.

[Ed P]

Not all is sweet with Bitdefender, it is very ‘dumbed-down’ compared with Kaspersky and does not have a finely tuned set of exclusions. So far however it hasn’t broken anything, and its web protection appears good.

[Dave Rice]

I’m not getting paranoid about Kaspersky just yet, but it has crossed my mind. I have a large 20 seat family version which makes it complicated, maybe at renewal next January. I rarely use Malwarebytes now as KIS seems to pick everything up just fine.

BTW Avira is now owned by Norton but I don’t know if they’ve changed the interface. For small businesses I have found Norton to be pretty damn good, very much changed from the bad old days, with enough customization as you really need.

However the charity can get cheap BitDefender Gravityzone licenses and that really is something else. It’s very much like the corporate grade AVs I used in the past. I can set up different policies for different scenarios and it’s totally over the top outside of a bigger business environment, but the depth of the activity reports is outstanding.

From those reports I can see that the “traditional” virus just isn’t an issue any more, I’ve not seen an attack across 10 devices in nearly 5 years. The main threats come from browser vulnerabilities and phishing attacks, which we’ve reduced to zero via educating the staff.

It’s Ransomware that is the big threat and that’s evolved itself preferring the threat of public disclosure rather than encrypting files. It’s firmly aimed at the bigger business who can pay, they’re not interested in your photos of your mum (or your old man).

If I ditch KIS it will be very reluctantly. I need to think about 15 – 20 devices and McAfee is very much in the running, which may surprise you. I really don’t take much notice of the artificial AV “benchmarks” and McAfee is a very different beast after Intel bought it (now sold again). It’s the whole package vs ease of use vs value for money that I look for now.

[Ed P]

Dave, it is not so much paranoia that triggered my decision to dump Kaspersky, but politics and my concerns for the terrible trauma that Russia is inflicting on Ukraine.

Eugene Kaspersky may have some little influence with Putin as exemplified by this Tass quote:

“”We have Kaspersky. I believe that he is really good in his line of business,” Putin said when asked whom Russia might offer up to be on par with Silicon Valley’s Elon Musk.”

I hope that by many people dumping Kaspersky and quoting Ukraine as a reason, that some message might get through to Putin that he needs to actively negotiate a settlement or risk crippling Russia’s long term tech interests.

[Ed P]

Dumping Russian software and tech sales to Russia is having an effect on them, they have announced measures to prop up their tech industry.

It is a pity that Putin does not just back down. Unfortunately he will never do such a thing as it would just result in him being kicked out, maybe even thrown to the ‘mercies’ of the Hague  as was done with Milosevic. (I’d maybe less cynical about the Hague if they would also prosecute TBLiar.)

El Reg link

[Ed P]

The German Security Service Advises people to dump Kaspersky because it is a potential risk.

El Reg Link

I am now much happier with Bitdefender having discovered that when opened by an Administrator it offers the same fine-tuning as that of Kaspersky. It actually seems better behaved than Kaspersky and does not slow things down as much when file copying etc.

[JayCeeDee]

Link not working – see if THIS one does.

[Dave Rice]

A lot of politics at the moment, I don’t buy into the theory that KIS will be used as an attack vector. Changing my AV 2 months into a 12 month sub won’t hurt the Russian economy either.

I have been through this hysteria with Hikvision cameras. If we want UK solutions someone had better start making them!

[Ed P]

BullGuard, Comodo and Sophos are British A/V companies. Bitdefender is Roumanian.

As I stated earlier it was not paranoia that made me dump Kaspersky but purely politics. There is little I can do in practical terms to aid Ukraine other than send money. While removing Kaspersky does not immediately hurt Russia, it does send a message that Putin has miscalculated the implications of his actions in many aspects and the harm it will do to Russia in the longer term. I believe that the US may have pushed him into making a huge error of judgement by continually stating that Russia would invade Ukraine.

While I understand the reasons for Russia’s actions it does not excuse them in any way at all.  If he had just postured with troop movements on the borders and then sent them home, I think he could have obtained most of Russia’s objectives without killing innocent people.

As it is, he has lost even if he gains Crimea and a chunk of Donbas. Pundits say that over 5000 Russian troops are dead, and very significant numbers of tanks and their aircraft have been lost. Russia has also lost politically and economically. The US has won in that it has managed to unite the EU and will almost certainly achieve the US objective of getting Germany etc to buy more US arms and spend more on defence. The US has also won from a weakened Russia.  BoJo has also won as Partygate and Tory Sleeze/corruption has disappeared from the headlines. However not all Tories have won, Rees-Mogg has lost big time on his Russian investment vehicle. China will almost certainly win from both Russian oil and gas going to them at discount prices, and also on the trade front by laundering Russian goods and minerals before carefully re-badging them as Chinese in origin.

[Dave Rice]

Ed, I’m not accusing you of paranoia! But there is plenty out there to go around. With regards Hikvision a lot of it is briefings by their OEM competitors or by other installers seeking to queer others bids often claiming the MoD have banned Hikvision (they haven’t).

I have personal experience of both of these and when you push for evidence it of course collapses, but dirt sticks as they say. I have heard that Hikvision Wi-Fi capable cameras can contact Beijing directly!

The MoD process isn’t straight forward as you will often be working through a third party to provide quotes to another third party project management outfit with the MoD sitting behind everything and not accessible. So these rumours can have power as often the people involved in the chain have neither technical or sector knowledge. Double that up for the MoD desk jockeys.

I always thought Bullguard was Danish? I have tried it a few times but it doesn’t stack up to the competition. I discounted Sophos as they are a bigger seat outfit, but I see they now do Home stuff and Comodo are now American. If I was concerned about meddling by country of origin I’d probably avoid anything American TBH. But I’m not.

[Ed P]

The Government (NCSC) has issued some sensible nuanced guidance on the use of Kaspersky A/V. It basically says that if your Industry is Nationally Sensitive then stop using Kaspersky et al. Otherwise carry on, but be aware that security updates might get blocked if the Government decides to widen sanctions.

[Dave Rice]

Sensible advice. I wonder how they’d block updates?

[Ed P]

I obviously do not know, but I’d guess they would use a similar mechanism to the way they blocked RT for a while. (looks like they have removed the block as you can now get through to rt.com). Previously if you tried to see what RT was saying the site came up with a message that seemed to imply that the DNS link was unavailable. I cannot remember the wording but it was unusually polite saying something like ‘the server could not be reached’ (not a 404).

While I am not taken in by RTs propaganda I find it a useful foil against the propaganda the Beeb feeds, and I feel the truth of the situation is somewhere between the two. e.g. the RT report that Bojo told Zelensky to keep fighting until offered a better deal has a ring of truth and pragmatism to it.

 

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