AVs, Firewalls etc

As on most forums we get lots of questions here about which AV etc is best but it seems to me that security must be nine points user and one point which program/suite. I'm sure I'm not going to be alone when I say that in the last ten, very active years I have knowingly only encountered one virus and MSE just dealt with it. As I also scan at least weekly with one or more of MBAM, SAS, and Iobit Malware Fighter, and as none of them has ever detected anything more sinister than tracking cookies I'm pretty certain nothing has ever slipped the net. Of course I always scan anything I d/load before using it and I don't open email attachments I'm not sure about without first saving them to disk and scanning them. I don't use flash drives or discs passed to me by friends without first checking them and on the net I just avoid sites that WOT warns me about. Oh, and I never use anything other than the Windows firewall.

I may be wrong but I believe my history would have been more or less the same whether I had been using Avast, Avira, AVG, Norton, MacAfee, Trend, Nod32 or any of the other mainstream security suites/programs and that this is probably true for most other safety conscious users. Those who d/load from or visit dodgy sites are just asking for it and will become infected at some point regardless of which security product they use.

That's my two pennyworth anyway.

EDIT - I also believe that the only 100% effective defence is regular system imaging so you can just back out of any problems.

 

Totally agree, Best Practices is what keeps you safe. Knowing where you are surfing, what you are downloading and not participating in warez, P2P downloads and pron sites in general.

The most I've had in the past few years is some ad tracking cookies that triggered a response from my software. I'm using MSE, Malwarebytes,Windows Firewall, and whatever protection my SPI router gives me. I run a few other passive scans every week or so...

And backups/images/whatever you want to do is critical because there are only two kinds of computer users:

Those who lose data and have no backup plan.
Those who lose data and do have a backup plan.