Comments on: Why I Don’t Use Antivirus

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:18:34 +0000

While it’s all well and good, it’s truly just plain inconsiderate not to, and to suggest that your average user not use AV is like asking a hooker not to wear condomns. Yeah, your married couples may not need protection, but someone who pours around in filth should have protection.

Suffice to say, looking at your resume, it’s easy to see why you wouldn’t need AV, most viruses nowadays are either outdated or based on patched exploits. Patching all your loopholes seems to do just as good of a job as AV, but your average user does a lot more idiotic stuff than you do, and they don’t realize it. For people who have an understanding of how things work, and what they need to do to avoid getting crap on their machine, yeah, go for it, but don’t encourage the fools of the internet to do the same.

By: John S

John S — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:15:55 +0000

I have thought the same for years myself. It was only until I started using Vista that I also stopped using A/V software. As what has been said, Anti virus does not do well at preventing anything. I ran Anti virus for 3 years with no hint of a virus. Even if you run without anti virus. You can still use a online scanner periodically to be sure. I think that’s why many A/V venders are trying to add other utilities to their suites so as to look like they have more value. Even though many of these are already included or available as free software or in the OS.

By: Jules

Jules — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:30:44 +0000

I don’t speak english very well, so don’t expect perfect writing… nor anything remotely close to that. Many people here asks how do you get aware of having virus in your system. Well… if you don’t notice that there is a virus in your pc, I don’t see the problem in having it. I notice viruses when my pc is working slower, when it does strange things, when configs change at there own will, when internet doesn’t work as well as it should, when I find broken files, etc, etc, etc. If i don’t notice that I have a virus (my computer runs fast as it should, internet does too, my files work as they should, etc, etc, etc), I simply don’t mind having it. What I can’t leave unnoticed is that resident antivirus slows the accesing of files, the internet navigation, the system startup, blah blah blah. What I mean is that having an AV is, the most of the times, equal or worse than having viruses. For example, some weeks ago I reinstalled windows on my mother’s computer. I left her no antivirus. The next week she was calling me because she had a virus. She was mad at me because i didn’t installed the AV, so I removed the viruses and installed Kaspersky AV. The next week she was calling me again and telling me that her pc was working worse than before. I went to her home again and i found out that now she had not only the same viruses she had before hurting the computers performance, but also the AV helping the virus cripple the system. AVs stink. Seriously. If you can’t remove a threat from your computer manually with no mayor efforts, trust me, you AV has no chance of accomplishing it either.

By: Cokehead

Cokehead — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:08:05 +0000

For the mac users above: Quit being so pompous :/ Macs aren’t any less hackable than windows, it just so happens that nobody is very concerned about writing viruses for a small segment of home computing.

The question is: Do you pay $3,000 for security through obscurity, or do you pay $600 and pay a little more attention to what your friends send you?

By: san

san — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:49:29 +0000

What about “old virus” — with no protection, you now can get any virus out there..

New ones are one thing but being caught by one that’s 10 years old will really be sad for you…

Get a free one, dont be stupid.

By: Draco

Draco — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 04:53:39 +0000

I use clamwin, it’s night and day diffrence from using my AVG copy on my desktop in terms of system resources, and I agree for similar reasons, Noscript is probably better than anti-virus.

By: James Lewis

James Lewis — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:15:50 +0000

I would agree that for the really advanced users, anti-virus is not really required, but for the average, and even above average, Windows user anti-virus is pretty critical. I don’t doubt that there are no issues when sticking to safe websites and only email from friends, but I can’t imagine most people only follow these guidelines. I run AVG Free and scan with Spybot every now and then and haven’t had a virus detected in a long time, but whenever I am setting up a computer for family or friends, anti-virus is one of the first things that gets installed.

By: Secure Enough: Or Security as Threat Mitigation at Cooking With Technology

Secure Enough: Or Security as Threat Mitigation at Cooking With Technology — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:03:27 +0000

[...] “Why I Don’t Use Antivirus” post has been receiving a recent surge of traffic, and with it, new commentors who open my [...]

By: peasleer

peasleer — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:51:17 +0000

@SuperG: Good question.

If we agree that the class of virus that antivirus would help protect you against can only infect you through user action, then it is implied that I will only catch a virus if I do something to contract it.

So if I don’t do anything, I don’t catch a virus.

If I do do something normal (e-mail, browsing the web, code) the risk is extremely minimal that I will catch a virus.

Because I never download executable attachments (programs) and only open attachments from people I know, I have no risk from e-mail attachments.

So the only attack vector I expose myself to is downloading things from the Internet. Even then, my risk is still nearly zero. I download from well-known sites, established open-source projects, or sites which I believe I have a reason to trust. The risk then from downloading is real, but minimal.

So on a day-to-day basis, it is very safe to assume that I haven’t contracted a virus. Understanding viruses also gives you great peace of mind.

Just for kicks, I ran Trend Micro’s Housecall – a web version of their PCillan antivirus software. No viruses. I must be lucky ;)

By: peasleer

peasleer — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:38:46 +0000

@Don: Good, I’m glad your approach is working for you. It sounds as though you would be very uncomfortable performing day-to-day operations without a virus scanner, and I thoroughly recommend people like you use one. If it gives you peace of mind, then little harm is being done.

However, the name of the game is risk mitigation. If you inconvenience yourself 99.9% of the time to protect against that .1% chance of being infected, is it worth it? I’ve been running without antivirus for over five years, and haven’t had a single incident with malicious software. So let us say that today, I randomly get a virus. That is one incident out of more than 1780 days – less than .05%. The impact will likely be minimal, as in no data loss (read my “viruses aren’t dangrous” statment in the original post) and equally minimal cleanup once discovered. To me, bogging down my system with a resident scanner, dealing with the updates, and paying a subscription (unless you go with something like AVG) is absolutely *not* worth protecting against that .05% chance.

I can not stress this enough: *If you spend more time dealing with your antivirus scanner than it would save you if you were to get infected, you are wasting your personal and computational resources.*

To get back to you Don, I’m sure using antivirus benefits you. Maybe you just have more stupid friends than I do, or you have absolutely no risk tolerance. For me, the risk has been proven to be nearly 0%, and gets closer to that point every day. So is my reasoning “fail,” as you so eloquently put? Or would funneling my resources into a system that serves me absolutely no purpose be “fail?” Of course I am biased, but I would go with the latter statement.