The article makes the whole industry sound shady. Which isn't surprising, either, given that there has to be quite a number of grey hats or even black hats working for these security firms.
Virus and antimalware is near useless now, anyway. More likely to cause false positives, false sense of security, and interfere with legitimate/non malware programs and cause other issues than detect and remove all viruses and malware from a system.
By only running trusted software and knowing what to opt-out of, I've never had a malware problem and I've run without security software on my primary systems my whole life.
The couple instances of idiots using my computer were always throughly analyzed by myself and eliminated, then thoroughly resolved by booting to the OS install disc and wiping all partitions before OS reinstall.
Well there was actually one time back when I had Windows 95 that someone in my family downloaded through dialup had a virus. I was able to remove it myself and did my OS reinstall anyway.
While servicing computers and removing malware for others, I've seen just about everything. I have my own best-practice procedures for cleaning as much as possible before ever attempting to run an automated scanning/removal tool (greatly reduced chance of something being botched or only partially-removed).
For many years, I repeatedly encountered some bizarre malware on various systems with Limewire installed. For some reason, it tripped-up every antivirus program thrown at it, or it would leave these files behind (probably because they weren't using he right procedures to delete them). It would add files with ".com" aliases for several existing ".exe" commands. Trying to run any command without explicitly typing ".exe" on the end (cmd, ipconfig, taskkill, tasklist, taskman, etc) would launch the .com version instead. Trying to launch "CMD," you'd only see a console window flash on the screen for a split second and disappear. I'd have to go through the system32 directory in the command line and do an attrib *.com to see the files with the +s and +h attributes, then
attrib [filename] -s -h command (both attributes must be removed at the same time) for each of those files, then the files can be deleted.
I guess now we have to be concerned about malware getting embedded in EFI firmware, but knowing what to trust goes a long way when it comes to security.
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