Before I begin, this offer may become bogus in the next week. Until then, I have to vouch for a prod­uct I’ve tried in the past and absolutely loved.

I fol­low a few dis­count hunters that often turn up great tech­nol­ogy deals. Today, I came across a deal from FatWallet.com for Kasper­sky Inter­net Secu­rity 2010 Legit 1 year key on 22nd Oct. I hardly use Win­dows any­more, but when it comes to antivirus soft­ware, Kasper­sky is the first name that comes to mind.

For full dis­clo­sure and FTC com­pli­ance, I’m not being comped to write this. This is a true tes­ti­mony to Kaspersky’s PC defense. When I was in high school, I used to wan­der through what the Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity IT Secu­rity Pol­icy Offi­cers con­sid­ered the “dark alleys of the inter­net” (read: IRC). So, I stopped and lost my edge on land­ing a real secu­rity job.

The first time I heard about this crazy awe­some antivirus pro­gram from Ger­many, I had no idea how weak Nor­ton and the rest of Syman­tec were to defend­ing from script kid­dies. When I would be asso­ci­at­ing with other indi­vid­u­als who were wreak­ing havoc with super sim­ple tools like Sub7, our first test was whether it passed through the lat­est Nor­ton, then the lat­est McAfee, and if you had a build that got through Kasper­sky you really had some­thing on your hands.

After Sub7 builds got picked up every after­noon, folks got into bots that included rootk­its for poorly man­aged linux servers. Asso­ciates of mine on IRC could con­trol thou­sands upon thou­sands of “bots” with a few favors from friends (read: the stuff you read on the news now 5 years later). When enough peo­ple had been “in the game” long enough, they started writ­ing their own cus­tom bots that did what they needed. Some wanted to auto­mate click­ing ads, oth­ers wanted to take down sites (read: DDOS), and some just loved the voyeuris­tic aspect of watch­ing what every­one typed.

The key to rolling your own bot was being unde­tected from antivirus net­works like Syman­tec, McAfee, and Kasper­sky. The dumb AVs would take days if not weeks to rec­og­nize a new sus­pi­cious mal­ware app. If you scanned your cus­tom bot (aka virus aka mal­ware aka bad thing) with Kasper­sky, it would be picked up and added to their data­base within hours. So if you, the badass coder, gave your bud­dies your new cre­ation and they scanned it too often, too quickly it would be flagged as a threat. Awe­some for stay-at-home moms, ter­ri­fy­ing for stay-at-home hackers.

When I was eval­u­at­ing PC antivirus soft­ware on a daily basic (full dis­clo­sure: from a some­what mali­cious point of view), I only respected Kasper­sky. Syman­tec was a joke, McAfee wasn’t much bet­ter, and I knew I had some­thing when Kasper­sky missed it. Maybe things have changed, doubt­ful I’ll get a good hacker to poke his/her head up to tell me dif­fer­ently, but I still hold my alliances with Kasper­sky when it comes to Win­dows defense. Maybe I’ll do more research on the bet­ter Mac AV (Kasper­sky doesn’t have one >:[), but until then I’ll defend my vir­tual machine with the best antivirus soft­ware I’ve ever attacked.