Antivirus is 'completely wasted money'
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Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
Antivirus has worked for me and many others
This is only appropriate for techies but I haven't used an anti-virus in years now and most of my work-mates don't either. We do have a good firewall and we do keep our software patched though. The rest of our "anti-virus" system involves not clicking bad links, not opening dodgy executable or executing unknown scripts. Common sense in other words (to techies.)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
"Common sense" keeps you from stepping into obvious traps (NUDE_PARIS_HILTON_SCREENSAVER.EXE and such), but unfortunately malware/crimeware authors have become _a_lot_ smarter. Sure, there still is an awful lot of idiots trying to prey on the unaware, but some of the more sophisticated approaches cannot simply be blocked by "common sense". We live in a time where it can be enough to load an (otherwise inconspicuous) webpage with a prepared image on it to get infected. There's a gazillion of exploits for almost every program you use on a daily basis - do you know all of them? If you don't use antivirus software then you must be either quite naive or rather ignorant.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
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"Common sense" keeps you from stepping into obvious traps (NUDE_PARIS_HILTON_SCREENSAVER.EXE and such), but unfortunately malware/crimeware authors have become _a_lot_ smarter. Sure, there still is an awful lot of idiots trying to prey on the unaware, but some of the more sophisticated approaches cannot simply be blocked by "common sense". We live in a time where it can be enough to load an (otherwise inconspicuous) webpage with a prepared image on it to get infected. There's a gazillion of exploits for almost every program you use on a daily basis - do you know all of them? If you don't use antivirus software then you must be either quite naive or rather ignorant.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
mav.northwind wrote:
If you don't use antivirus software then you must be either quite naive or rather ignorant.
Then explain how many techies get by fine without anti-virus.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
I can only say that he is a dumbass then! Antivirus has worked for me and many others. You just need to know what to do and what not to do.
And you're firmly in the same category. I can tell you from experience that to avoid having to use A/V software, you simply have to know what to do and what not to do. I don't use A/V software on any of my five machines.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
And you're firmly in the same category.
Rubbish. Nobody is a dumbass just because he runs an antivirus. Unless, of course, it's Norton. :rolleyes:
Cheers, Vikram.
The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.
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jhaga wrote:
No, it is my sig. Just a small experiment.
Experiment to discover what? If someone told me they could get me a great job earning $100 per month I'd probably laugh. And why does it go to a page with nothing but adverts. Is this how you are earning $100 per month?
Recent blog posts: * Introduction to LINQ to XML (Part 1) - (Part 2) - (part 3) My website | Blog
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"Common sense" keeps you from stepping into obvious traps (NUDE_PARIS_HILTON_SCREENSAVER.EXE and such), but unfortunately malware/crimeware authors have become _a_lot_ smarter. Sure, there still is an awful lot of idiots trying to prey on the unaware, but some of the more sophisticated approaches cannot simply be blocked by "common sense". We live in a time where it can be enough to load an (otherwise inconspicuous) webpage with a prepared image on it to get infected. There's a gazillion of exploits for almost every program you use on a daily basis - do you know all of them? If you don't use antivirus software then you must be either quite naive or rather ignorant.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
mav.northwind wrote:
NUDE_PARIS_HILTON_SCREENSAVER.EXE
No, that was indeed a screensaver with n... Oh... :-O
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Do not feed the troll ! - Common proverb -
mav.northwind wrote:
If you don't use antivirus software then you must be either quite naive or rather ignorant.
Then explain how many techies get by fine without anti-virus.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
Sheer luck. Or perhaps they don't get by and are already infected with a keylogger, spambot or anything else from the wide range of malware. It's no longer the simple viri that infect executables and delete system-critical files on every 5th of july. Nowadays, the goal of this software is not to be noticed. Can you really say that you know what your machine does whenever the disk LED lites up or your network connection shows traffic? Perhaps anti-virus software developers don't know either in some cases, but I, for my part, know that they know a lot more about how malware works than I do, so I try to keep my signatures up-to-date.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
And you're firmly in the same category.
Rubbish. Nobody is a dumbass just because he runs an antivirus. Unless, of course, it's Norton. :rolleyes:
Cheers, Vikram.
The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.
Today, I'm not in the mood to explain what I say.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
jhaga wrote:
No, it is my sig. Just a small experiment.
Experiment to discover what? If someone told me they could get me a great job earning $100 per month I'd probably laugh. And why does it go to a page with nothing but adverts. Is this how you are earning $100 per month?
Recent blog posts: * Introduction to LINQ to XML (Part 1) - (Part 2) - (part 3) My website | Blog
Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
Is this how you are earning $100 per month?
Yes, it is me earning $100. The experiment is to see how many people actually go to that page, and how many presses a link on the site. Also interesting to see how fast google indexes pages like that. Sometimes it gets indexed in 15 min and other times never. jhaga
How to earn $100/month.
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http://news.zdnet.com/2424-1009_22-202297.html[^] "A better way of dealing with the unknown is to use whitelists--where only authorized or approved software can execute" I don't think it is so easy to do, but probably is the only way to go. jhaga
How to earn $100/month.
jhaga wrote:
I don't think it is so easy to do, but probably is the only way to go.
absolutely, we all know users never download and install anything they don't know about, and never approve anything they don't know everything about. :rolleyes:
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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mav.northwind wrote:
If you don't use antivirus software then you must be either quite naive or rather ignorant.
Then explain how many techies get by fine without anti-virus.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
Hi Paul, I totally agree with you. You could have added: How to explain how many AV-users get infected while having a running anti-virus... How many people get sensitive information lost/stolen because they didn't backup/protect it... AVs are kind of Vs also!
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Sheer luck. Or perhaps they don't get by and are already infected with a keylogger, spambot or anything else from the wide range of malware. It's no longer the simple viri that infect executables and delete system-critical files on every 5th of july. Nowadays, the goal of this software is not to be noticed. Can you really say that you know what your machine does whenever the disk LED lites up or your network connection shows traffic? Perhaps anti-virus software developers don't know either in some cases, but I, for my part, know that they know a lot more about how malware works than I do, so I try to keep my signatures up-to-date.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
I'm saddened you think so little of your fellow developers. These are the guys who rant and rave when a bug goes unfixed, when Apple's software phones home or when an exploit is found in TIFF. They read vulernability reports for breakfast and submit logs for the guys who patch systems to block exploits. We also have IT departments that do scour network traffic, that have deep-packet sniffers and that shut you out when your system is taken over. Bot-nets aren't subtle you realise. It isn't luck that keeps people alive, its street smarts and most of us have been doing it for a decade now. We aren't infallible but anti-virus systems are slow, intrusive, get in the way and are fallible too. I've seen non-techie computers with anti-virus installed and they are still ridden with malware. Doesn't seem to help.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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Sheer luck. Or perhaps they don't get by and are already infected with a keylogger, spambot or anything else from the wide range of malware. It's no longer the simple viri that infect executables and delete system-critical files on every 5th of july. Nowadays, the goal of this software is not to be noticed. Can you really say that you know what your machine does whenever the disk LED lites up or your network connection shows traffic? Perhaps anti-virus software developers don't know either in some cases, but I, for my part, know that they know a lot more about how malware works than I do, so I try to keep my signatures up-to-date.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
mav.northwind wrote:
Can you really say that you know what your machine does whenever the disk LED lites up or your network connection shows traffic? Perhaps anti-virus software developers don't know either in some cases, but I, for my part, know that they know a lot more about how malware works than I do, so I try to keep my signatures up-to-date.
No offense mav, but that sounds a lot like superstition to me...
Citizen 20.1.01
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
And you're firmly in the same category.
Rubbish. Nobody is a dumbass just because he runs an antivirus. Unless, of course, it's Norton. :rolleyes:
Cheers, Vikram.
The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.
Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:
Nobody is a dumbass just because he runs an antivirus.
Nobody is a dumbass just because he knocks on wood whenever he sees a black cat. Still, that fact alone doesn't exactly say much of a person's understanding...
Citizen 20.1.01
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
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mav.northwind wrote:
If you don't use antivirus software then you must be either quite naive or rather ignorant.
Then explain how many techies get by fine without anti-virus.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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Our anti-virus isn't to protect us. It's to protect the masses. Try educating 9,000+ users about the nuances that make viruses stand out. Now do that in an environment that had a bit of turnover in the ranks.
Yup, that is exactly what I am saying. For people who are not street-smart give them anti-virus, the rest of us can cope.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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http://news.zdnet.com/2424-1009_22-202297.html[^] "A better way of dealing with the unknown is to use whitelists--where only authorized or approved software can execute" I don't think it is so easy to do, but probably is the only way to go. jhaga
How to earn $100/month.
I'm a techie and I am careful, but I am really struggling to see what he is on about. If my anti virus stops me having to go through the said routine of reinstalling my machine because of something which has got at my machine, then the AV has paid for itself. Put simply, I can earn more than the price of my AV subscription in the time it would take to rejig my machine. It short this is utter hogwash. I agree that he has some points about the 'rights' to execute software but to just flat out say that anti-virus is a waste of money is ridiculous. So I'll turn off my AV and then be open to all the 'known' threats as well as the unknown ones. Just ridiculous!!!
The only thing unpredictable about me is just how predictable I'm going to be.
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Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
Antivirus has worked for me and many others
This is only appropriate for techies but I haven't used an anti-virus in years now and most of my work-mates don't either. We do have a good firewall and we do keep our software patched though. The rest of our "anti-virus" system involves not clicking bad links, not opening dodgy executable or executing unknown scripts. Common sense in other words (to techies.)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
I use anti virus software and do the same as you, but with malicious content making it's way onto ad networks, this crap is making it's way onto more and more legitimate sites.
In this paper, we provide a detailed study of the pervasiveness of so-called drive-by downloads on the Internet. Drive-by downloads are caused by URLs that attempt to exploit their visitors and cause malware to be installed and run automatically. Our analysis of billions of URLs over a 10 month period shows that a non-trivial amount, of over 3 million malicious URLs, initiate drive-by downloads. An even more troubling finding is that approximately 1.3% of the incoming search queries to Google’s search engine returned at least one URL labeled as malicious in the results page.
On top of that, some of these sites are updating their binaries every hour making signature based av nearly useless for those sites. [edit]Not really a response to your statement, but just a general this stuff is really starting to suck for everybody, and with exploits embedded in flash, and dynamically obfuscated javascript with interaction, location and time based activation it's bad for everyone.[/edit] More info here: All your iFrames point to us[^]
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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I am not working for a small company and so I cannot decide if or not to have an antivirus in my computer at work place. Using an antivirus simply does not have anything to do with being a techie. I believe that I am techie enough, but I will want to run an antivirus too. It is just a matter of individual priorities.
Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself. - Cicero .·´¯`·->Rajesh<-·´¯`·. Codeproject.com: Visual C++ MVP
Rajesh, I was like you way back when. Ran AV on every computer, diligently updated, diligently answered all the annoying dialogs, diligently forked over hundreds of dollars a year for a piece of software that used resources and never told me anything I didn't already know. I'm not arrogant, I've just been around the block and know when "Bob's Fantastic Toolbar!" is dodgy out. Then one day, after about the fifth time Windows told me to disable an AV while installing X, I uninstalled my AV and never reinstalled it. Never had a problem since. If you don't feel comfortable without an AV then fine, go ahead and keep using one. But don't tell the rest of us that we have to use one.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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"Common sense" keeps you from stepping into obvious traps (NUDE_PARIS_HILTON_SCREENSAVER.EXE and such), but unfortunately malware/crimeware authors have become _a_lot_ smarter. Sure, there still is an awful lot of idiots trying to prey on the unaware, but some of the more sophisticated approaches cannot simply be blocked by "common sense". We live in a time where it can be enough to load an (otherwise inconspicuous) webpage with a prepared image on it to get infected. There's a gazillion of exploits for almost every program you use on a daily basis - do you know all of them? If you don't use antivirus software then you must be either quite naive or rather ignorant.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
Why not just use AVG 8 Free Edition. People it's free and gets updated as well. I mean on there site they talk about millions of users use their Anti virus. Plus having a anti virus is just a precaution, it's like having to check your oil of your car every month, though usually you don't need to but it better safe than sorry. :-D
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jhaga wrote:
No, it is my sig. Just a small experiment.
To find out what??
Maruf Maniruzzaman @ Dhaka, Bangladesh. [Homepage] [Blog] [Silverlight Clone] [Resume]
Maruf Maniruzzaman wrote:
To find out what??
The experiment is to see how many people actually go to that page, and how many presses a link on the site. Also interesting to see how fast google indexes pages like that. Sometimes it gets indexed in 15 min and other times never.
How to earn $100/month.