Is Antivirus Software a Waste of Money?

[Chiefcrowe]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/antivirus/


I wonder what the man in the article has done to mitigate the chance of another password stealer trojan to get his bank login info?

 

[Shawn]

Eh, I use MSE and used to use avast, but I've never had it come up where it wasn't a false positive. A lot of it is just common sense.

When I have to fix computers with viruses I find that all of the people had antivirus (which had the latest definitions btw) and the virus still found a way through. They are practly worthless these days. Only line of defense is common sense.

 

[Lemon law]

In a word, no, we all need an ant-virus. But only fools think only an ante-virus can do the job of a multilayered computer defense. The object of the game is to gave a firewall, hips and hosts, process control, to filter out virus exploits long before they get to your CPU and try to execute and register said burus,

 

[smakme7757]

If we get back to basics we can say that an AV is a black list of software. This is extremely useful, but he does raise a point. If I look at my log of blocked attacks it's currently sitting at 0, so I could in theory uninstall and be safe.

But why take the chance?

As mentioned above, layers are the most important way to prevent malware.

Run as a standard user
Have a good firewall
Use a quality AV
Use common sense

It's also worthwhile mentioning that hiding malware from the latest AV definitions isn't hard. There are a multitude of paid underground software that can mutate any piece of malware to keep it FUD (fully undetectable).

 

[KirklandBrand]

I wouldn't say it's a waste of money... But I'm might be repeating my self here but Here is my component to multi-layer security.

1. Avira Free-AV
2. Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (ASLR, DEP)
3. MVPS Hosts file
4. Script blocking on web-browser
5. IP Blocking software (e.g peerblock) with adware,spyware and virus lists.
6. Common sense.

AV is just a component and if you want a good one pay for it but for me free on will suffice.