Expert: Carolyn Meinel - 6/23/2006

Question
i use symantec antivirus service park  on the internet network i am managing ,but at times i still have virus problems.please which is the best antivirus in the market and which is the best virus scanner

Answer
Do you mean that you are running a business network and you want to know the best antivirus to work at tyhe network level, filtering out incoming virus and worm attacks, or are you talking about a home network of just a half dozen or so computers?

If you are running a large business network, Symantec has a corporate edition that works quite well. Another that is as good is the F-Secure antivirus http://www.f-secure.com/ which offers both home and corporate versions. F-Secure is the world's most popular antivirus world-wide.

As for which antivirus is "best," that all depends upon what you value the most. The problem with using one of the world leader's programs (Symantec, F-Secure) is that virus writers work hard at finding ways to destroy these antivirus programs. So if a virus programmer genius figures out how to damage them, these antivirus programs would become (temporarily) worthless. Yes, this has happened in the past to Symantec; I'm not sure about F-Secure, but certainly we can expect somebody is working hard to try to wreck F-Secure and who knows, maybe some evil genius might succeed -- but only temporarily. The makers of antivirus programs usually have a repair available within hours of discovering a successful attack. Furthermore, successful attacks are rare.

If you use a less common antivirus such as the free version of Avast! antivirus, from http://www.avast.com or AVG, free from http://free.grisoft.com they are unlikely to be targeted by evil virus writers, but they won't always work quite as well as the market leaders, either. And these free programs don't work so well in big business networks.