OT: BT Protect

[Chris Hogg]

A bit OT, but uk.comp.misc is very quiet these days, and I'm sure opinions will be available here.

My ISP is btinternet.com. I've been with them about 10 months ever since Virgin Media threw me off. Quite happy with them so far, but I'm not very demanding.

I've just had an email from BT, offering me free online security using BT Protect. Unwilling to just rush in, I Googled for it, and got lots of hits for BT Net Protect. I'm not sure whether what was offered to me is the same thing. But reading some of the reviews of BT Net Protect, I get the impression it's just McAfee repackaged. I used to use McAfee very many years ago, but found it slow to load and memory-hungry. It may be better these days. The AV I currently use is Kaspersky, which isn't cheap but does seem to be well thought of.

Does anyone have a view of BT Protect? Is it any good, is it McAfee repackaged and is it worth ditching Kaspersky in favour of BT Protect, assuming it's a broadly comparable replacement? I must say that despite the price, I'm very happy with Kaspersky, and better the devil you know etc.

[Scott M]

BT's marketing department have the biggest spurs in the industry (yee-ha!) so anything that comes through trying to sell you anything should be burnt and buried in an unmarked grave.

All virus checkers are bloody awful - they seem to work by dragging the computer down to a level where it can't be used for anything else. McAfee, from what I've seen, is on a Norton level of waste of time.

[Ranger]

Even sillier than you usually manage.

- they seem to work by dragging the

[Richard]

Fuck off Rod

[Brian-Gaff]

Don't bother changing unless they make it a condition of service. I've heard some disturbing reports of machines getting messed up by it. Brian

[Brian-Gaff]

Well don't know about that but people do get used to the foibles of their particular security system and attempting to remove them and install another should be easy, but often is a headache when you realise that deactivation is protected against for obvious reasons. There have been criticisms of the Microsoft system, and I do not suppose it would potect any user who always opens dodgy looking emails and visits hacked sites, but it most certainly does jump on a lot of crap that one might get by accident due to a moments lapse of judgement or nasty phishing emails.

Add a nice stand alone malware scanner of your choice every so often and to me its as least as good as the paid for solutions, and a lot less intrusive as well. Brian

[bert]

In article , Chris Hogg writes

The simple answer is yes, it is McAfee. It's free with Infinity to download and run on (can't remember how many) machines). I have it on 3 currently. Usage is optional. Any further questions on BTinternet you could ask on uk.telecom.broadband or alt.internet.providers.uk.btinternet

[polygonum]

Actually, Microsoft's own A/V seems pretty effective. Whatever guise it is in - MSE, InTune Endpoint, W10 Defender, etc.

It appears that there are going to improve it to help protect against the stuff that currently isn't strictly malware - like browser hijacks.

I wouldn't install BT's offering.

[Johnny B Good]

Yes, even the lightweight freebies of worth such as Avast Free, until it too went the way of AVG Free, still impose some performance penalty on the system.

Chris is quite right to ignore the BT offering (it's just a marketing "Tick the Boxes" exercise of the worst kind). He might as well stick with Kaspersky which seems to be highly regarded amongst the Heinz 57 varieties number of AV products available today (a figure based on the number of AV engines used by Virustotal's "Suspicious File" scanning service).

Virgin Media, just like the other major ISPs, also perpetrate this "Box Ticking" marketing strategy, again afaicr, based on a McAfee product.

[Johnny B Good]

Ah, out of the frying pan and into the fire. :-)

That said, if you weren't very demanding (and don't mind me asking), how the hell did you manage to get ditched by Virgin Media?

It's not so much the devil you know as the fact that the answers to your questions are no, yes and no. The "Golden Rule", as far as any ISP supplied crapware is concerned, is to simply add their CD to your growing heap of "Bird Scarers" once you've copied any useful pdf instruction manuals that might prove useful in the event of any future trouble shooting exercises.

[alan_m]

Many of the better free and paid for products of the past were re-designed to become bloat ware and/or, on an upgrade, to litter your hard disk with thousands of 'housekeeping' files. It's almost like they became the virus themselves.

My laptop came with McAfee pre-installed and it was a right pain in the arse to remove all traces of it. Even after an un-install every few weeks a pop-up would appear giving the option to re-install the latest upgrade. In the end a search of the registry had to be undertaken to find the last remaining remnants.

Norton became a truly horrendous beast a dozen years ago when they purchased companies that had developed well respected software applications. Norton then tried to amalgamate these multiple applications into a suite of products for themselves. They didn't succeed but released them anyway.

My strategy that has worked well for 20+ years is to use one of the lighter weight products but NOT to run it in the background. One of the products I currently use is Malwarebytes which I run occasionally or after a download of a new program.

+1 Much like some of the banks pushing rather inferior 'security' products.

[Chris Hogg]

Simple. I was one of the many thousands of VM subscribers who weren't on cable, and VM intended to dump all their non-cable business into Talk Talk, and at short notice (a few days, in my case, IIRC). Not having heard anything good about TT, and lots bad, I opted for BT instead, accepting that there were still plenty of people not happy with BT service. But apart from the occasional offer of 'additional features' (such as this one) it's been OK so far.

[Chris Hogg]

Thanks for all the replies. I'll stick with what I've got and ignore the BT Protect offer. I'm very happy with Kaspersky and the occasional check with Malwarebytes.

[polygonum]

One of the few real viruses I have been involved with would have been prevented by a full install of Malwarebytes (i.e. the active functions not just the manual scanning) or Trusteer Rapport. Many other standard AV products could put up no defence at all.

It was a man-in-the-middle attack which sat between user and their real browser window. Luckily the user realised something didn't feel/look right before any further damage had been done. But the only removal technique was complete clean install.

[Johnny B Good]

Ah! Thanks for the clarification. I don't blame you for wanting to stay out of the clutches of TT.

[polygonum]

Recent experience of TT, even at a remove (i.e. a customer of ours si signed up with them), makes me shudder. "There isn't such a thing as a static ip address. They change all the time. Yes - even businesses with servers."

[Huge]

[snippage]

Sheesh.