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Yeah, I never understood the purpose of anti-virus software. If you have a vulnerability that would allow a virus to make its way onto the machine enough for a
by randomdata 15y ago
Yeah, I never understood the purpose of anti-virus software. If you have a vulnerability that would allow a virus to make its way onto the machine enough for a virus scanner to find the virus, someone will use that same vulnerability to access your system in a way that a virus scanner will not protect you.
- CWuestefeld 15y agoI should stop using my web browser and email client, and any other downloaded software that didn't come on my OS install disc?
- randomdata 15y agoI guess in a perfect world. Obviously that is not going to happen though. Anti-virus software is like having airport security that only screens those that fit a certain profile. Someone not meeting that profile is going to walk onto a plane with the intent to do harm, at which point you are no further ahead than you were when you had no security checks at all.
- CWuestefeld 15y agoI think you haven't kept up with recent developments in AV software. These days, they continue to monitor all those passengers even after they've gotten on the plane. And remember, there are a lot of different planes -- each of our individual machines -- and the AV software has also improved in its ability to see something bad on one of the planes and quickly notify the rest of us.
- randomdata 15y agoI realize AV software applies heuristics to identify some attacks, but in the absence of intent, it is impossible to do it effectively. One man's botnet is another man's legitimate computing cluster. Unless you warn about everything going on in the system, you are not really aware of everything. If you do warn about everything, the user will start to ignore the warnings.