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Antivirus-less setup

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apankrat:
Does anyone here run their primary machine without a resident (always on) antivirus? Not because of the ignorance, negligence or laziness, but with it being a conscious choice. Simply be careful with installing and running 3rd party code (and have a dedicated VM for testing and trying random stuff).

Just curious if I'm an odd one out :-)

TaoPhoenix:
Last I knew on Windows the big problem was ambient Drive-By attacks that involved no user interaction at at all. There was a meme at one point that a Windows Box "busy patching" with no AV would get hacked in a matter of hours.

eleman:
I do that for maybe 10 years, without the VM, with occasional use of virustotal.

apankrat:
@TaoPhoenix - Good point, forgot to mention that all network interfaces are locked down in some form or fashion. Basically, there are few ways to get the machine infected with no interaction - mail, browser and network services. If these are sandboxed, the rest of the machine doesn't really need an always-on AV, does it?

@eleman - Ack, same here wrt virustotal.

eleman:
Last I knew on Windows the big problem was ambient Drive-By attacks that involved no user interaction at at all. There was a meme at one point that a Windows Box "busy patching" with no AV would get hacked in a matter of hours.

-TaoPhoenix (September 28, 2012, 02:50 AM)
--- End quote ---

Usual windows boxes at homes sit behind blank NAT tables of DSL modems. So the chances are not that high even for vanilla windows xp boxes to get infected without a user browsing penis enlargement sites.

Though machines on universities or other places with a direct internet connection or boxes in large LANs would be subject to this criticism.

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