As an expansion on my last article, I felt the need to expand on what I said about marketing by anti-virus companies, and software vendors in general.
I find it kind of disheartening that anti-virus companies market their products as the only way you can protect yourself from viruses. They play their software off as this magical thing that will stop every virus in it’s tracks. We know this simply isn’t true. Infact, most anti-viruses only detect 80% of infections, and that percentile is only dropping more and more every day.
The truth is, anti-malware software is really only there to alert you to a possible infection. 99% of the time you need to reinstall Windows anyways. This stuff roots in so deep it’s almost impossible to remove.
By giving consumers a false sense of security, they start to take part in more and more risky activities. This is just the opposite of what we want. Of course, this gives the anti-virus software a chance to step in and say, “oh look, we found a virus in that last illegal song you downloaded!”. The consumer thinks “well it’s doing it’s job! It caught it!”, and they continue on their merry way, not realizing that the malware might be doing more stuff the security software might not catch.
This seems to come off as false advertising. Wouldn’t a doctor be in some sort of legal trouble if he said he could cure your cancer without an invasive procedure such as radiation, surgery, or chemo? I thought so.
The most important anti-virus software is you. Yes, you. If you’re smart about what you do, such as not visiting risky websites, not downloading shady content (legal or not), not opening email attachments from people you don’t know, and keeping your software up to date, you’re golden. I know many people who run a Windows PC without anti-virus, and they’ve never had an issue.
If we taught people how to properly use their computers, instead of letting software cleaning up after them, we’d have a much safer online experience.
