You're definitely right about that. I think it's from the XP days, but I remember reading about antivirus vendors creating their own security holes and vulnerab

You're definitely right about that. I think it's from the XP days, but I remember reading about antivirus vendors creating their own security holes and vulnerabilities, where running antivirus software made your computer less secure than without it. And then when Microsoft wanted to create fixes to prevent said vulnerabilities from being exploitable, the antivirus vendors actually threatened to sue them to avoid putting in the engineering work to fix their shitty code. EDIT: In many cases, these security changes meant deep architectural changes were required to third party solutions. And most ecosystem vendors were not incented to invest heavily in their legacy apps. Some of these solutions took the unorthodox approach of modifying data structures and even instructions in the kernel in order to implement their functionality, bypassing APIs and multiprocessor locks, often causing havoc. At one point, something like 70% of all Windows “blue screens” were caused by these third party drivers and their unwillingness to use supported APIs to implement their functionality. Antivirus vendors were notorious for using this approach. In my role as head of Microsoft security, I personally spent years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to “patch” kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel — the same approach that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our “friends”, the antivirus vendors, threatened to sue us in return, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies? They just wanted their old solutions to keep working even if that meant reducing the security of our mutual customers — the very thing they were supposed to be improving. https://blog.usejournal.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-an-insiders-retrospective-f713ee77c239?gi=86c23f881661 https://blog.usejournal.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-...