Antivirus software is 'increasingly useless' and may make your computer less safe

[LabZero]

Another problem concerns the complexity of the malware.
If packer or encrypter are used to “modify” a particular piece of malware, each of these software uses a different algorithm. Of course, once you identify that a binary has been compacted or encrypted it is necessary to know the algorithm and the encryption key. All of this makes particularly difficult to recognize malware by AV and the only option, then, is to “capture” the original code from the memory at the time of the execution, the operation is certainly not easy and very risky, including the use of proactive technologies.

The number of programs that can be exploited by cyber criminals in order to conceal the code of the malware is more and more high, and antivirus can actually become useless over that insecure, but we remember that it is only the second level of security.

 

[jackuars]

But why? I use different pieces of software and haven't seen any of them in action so the professor is absolutely right. Common sense + up to date software is the key to sucess. The other thing is that it all depends on peoples habits and if someone is turning the protection off to run the crack then there is no software in this world which could keep him safe.

Common sense comes from experience. I'm sure we all have been infected at various points through these years to know what we should and what we shouldn't. A newbie doesn't know this. So having something is always better than nothing. No use crying over spilt milk after the damage has been done.

 

[DardiM]

Too many users install an AV and then think they are in a fortress ... doing non sense / dangerous installations, clicking on "yes" / "ok" / "next" buttons without reading the messages (even when its an UAC prompt), etc...
I know a lot of person all around me in this category of users. They can have Common Sense for others subject, but when it relies to computer security, they seems to "bug"
=> it doesn't matter how strong is their AV, when having this behavior.

 

[Hatsuner]

Well, I just deleted all my free AV software and installed an adblocker and an adscanner.
Why? Because none of the 5 free and populair AV I had detected an app with ads outside of it.
This app is, however, already been removed from the PlayStore, while it had 1 million+ downloads.

My ad-scanner said there were only AdMob and StartApp in it.
Now I know to not trust StartApp, I already have other apps with AdMob in it that didn't give me ads outside the app.

Also, my antiviruses drained quite a lot RAM on the background.

 

[JHomes]

I believe this. I had an AV installed for months but when I saw that the definitions were pretty much nothing short of useless I uninstalled it. A good AV would have definition updates constantly but in reality you get a few a month or so. Not as frequent or in depth as they should be.

 

[DJ Panda]

AVs are not useless reguardless of certain problems. The good tends to outweigh the bad. I have used Avast for about 10+ years and it never has disappointed.