4 ms·
I just wish we told/heared more stories about antivirus being useful. As it stands, anti-malware sounds like the worst malware on the planet.
by nikanj 3y ago
I just wish we told/heared more stories about antivirus being useful. As it stands, anti-malware sounds like the worst malware on the planet.
- bell-cot 3y agoI suspect that the #1 benefit of antivirus is that it makes success, especially more-than-shortlived success, far more difficult for Team Evil. (Yes, obviously it would be difficult at best to quantify that benefit.)
- TheRealPomax 3y agoSo go looking for it. Good news doesn't make the news, it makes people's blogs. Go google for folks talking about how they didn't get their entire network crypto-locked with bitcoin ransoms because their AV did its job. The stories are out there, they're just not delivered to your doorstep because there's no sensationalism in them with which to sell clicks and ad impressions.
- udev4096 3y agoAV at it's best prevents script kiddies. It is ridiculously easy to bypass an AV. However, most of the organizations rely on EDRs, not AVs
- charcircuit 3y agoAVs help prevent malware from scaling. Sure you can bypass an AV to hack O(10) pole, but can you bypass it to hack O(1000000) people?
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoThe scaling problem isn’t that hard with traditional signature based AV, the upfront work is largely the same irrelevant of scale of infections. You just keep updating your obfuscator/packer tool and constantly deploy new, undetected binaries. There’s online “crypter” services which are quite cheap that will do this for you - give you a constant stream of new, unique, undetected versions of your malware executable. AV is basically very good at blocking yesterdays threats - the shit it knows about. Professional blackhats just factor constant evasion into their operating costs (which includes other costs like new C&C domains, VPS’s, buying traffic for installs. etc) anyway.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoIt's not hard, it just adds cost. If the cost is more than the reward, we get less malware. This is good.
- LinuxBender 3y agoIt absolutely helps the malware magnets that manage to download malware daily and visit watering holes / phishing sites on a regular basis. There are better ways to block malware but they are higher friction and the majority of cautious people would find it too intrusive. Such as preventing downloading unless a file is in a pre-approved hash-table which is a thing I've had companies try to convince me we needed.
- fortran77 3y agoI would not want my 90 year old mother, or my technically incompetent 64 year old brother to not have an antivirus on thir computers, even if it occasionally makes mistakes.
- dotnet00 3y agoYes, I feel one thing that often gets overlooked is MS Defender having more or less replaced the need for AVs for most people with a 'free' AV that works well (relative to other previous options) and doesn't saddle the system with all sorts of adware. A few months ago I did some maintenance on my Dad's old laptop, found it was running one of the old spammy AVs which feel the need to install browser addons and tons of other garbage. The AV was bogging down the system hard, uninstalling it helped a lot, but then a few days later it came back begging you to reinstall it. That one left me baffled as to how anyone thought that wasn't blatant malware-style behavior intending to bypass maintenance to dupe people who are less caught up on the state of computing.