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ghacks post: "Why I decided to uninstall my Antivirus software"

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Deozaan:
If I knew no one else would ever use my computer or have any direct access to it, I'd feel really confident about not having anti-virus software running in the background.

But if you have a shared computer or a computer on a network, and some of the people you share your computer/network with are somewhere on the verge of computer literacy, I'd keep it running.

Most people know enough to download screensavers, games, and other crap, and how to install that crap. What they don't know is how to recognize dubious sites, dubious programs, dubious attachments, etc.

One example is when I found my computer infected by a virus, I knew I hadn't infected my own computer, so I asked my mom to scan hers.  Turns out my mother had opened an attachment on her computer, it didn't do anything (or so she thought) so she ignored it, and it infected the rest of our computers because we had mapped network drives for easy file sharing across computers.

You're only as secure as your weakest defense.

Eóin:
I never have and never will run an antivirus program in the background. Anything halfway suspicious I will test in a VM but I firmly believe that if someone can get malware to run on my pc then the battle is already lost, I don't trust antivirus solutions to catch the real threats.

I realise that sounds naive but the odd time I full a full scan the pc has turned up clean.

f0dder:
I've run with antivirus for long periods of time, and I've run without for long periods of time. Currently I run without. It's either completely without, or completely with (including always-running on-access scanning, but no scheduled full system scans, those are silly).

Eóin, you're almost 100% right in that "if someone can get malware to run on my pc then the battle is already lost", this is the argument I use against outward firewalls... Thing is, you can't guard yourself 100% against os/browser security holes, even if you use a NAT router etc. But the kind of malware that can creep in through such a relatively narrow hole is relatively limited in size, so should be able to be caught by decent on-access antivirus (especially something that also has behavioral blocking).

The nasty stuff that attacks your firewall and antivirus products tends to be those big malware bundles that people get through clicking olsen_sisters_nude.scr...
 
Since I don't have anybody using my computer regularly, and I pay a lot of attention to what happens on my system, I feel safe enough about running without antivirus software.

EDIT: but I wouldn't run without antivirus if it wasn't for adblock. Why? here's why.

Lashiec:
Eóin mentioning virtual machines reminded me of something. The use of something like Sandboxie could be a good alternative for when you're browsing the Internet, and you don't want the antivirus scanning (and slowing down) your traffic. Heck, I would even say that it's more secure than an antivirus.

Actually, I encountered one of those fantastic redirections f0dder links to last week, while browsing in Firefox. As it's not my primary browser, I have no extensions installed there. Now I have AdBlock Plus, just to be sure.

f0dder:
I've been meaning to try out Sandboxie and/or altiris svs... seem like nice ideas, but I just haven't bothered yet. I wonder if either of those are good alternatives to using a fullblown vm for testing shareware apps etc. (ie., lighter on resources, less bother, but still enough encapsulation that you can entirely remove the stuff again).

Just remember that even things like sb/svs aren't 100% foolproof, afaik there's been exploits for both... but generic exploits probably won't target that kind of stuff.

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