Anti-virus Software: Medicine worse than the illness?

Anti-virus software, firewall and updated OS used to be the trifecta of computer security. But lately, I’ve been thinking. Maybe the bigger and bigger security software isn’t that useful anymore.

For a casual user, this may seem like a completely heretic idea. We all heard about mail viruses, ransomware and many other threats all around us. But we should ask a few questions.

First of all, how many security threats have been detected by your anti-virus? For me personally, it was about 10 during my time with computers. We never really know how effective anti-viruses are, we just know the test results by specialized companies, but those usually take a look at viruses that have been well known. Heuristic analysis never worked well for me, usually, it was just silent and it was screaming at times where I knew the software was 100 % clean. After a few times, it yelled “wolf” I just started to ignore it the way we know from the old story.

Modern malware is very careful, tries to get into your system silently and not to do much because the less you do the harder it is to find you. And this is where the fake feeling of security comes into play for several reasons.

1. Anti-viruses can only detect known viruses
   This is not a joke! If you take a look at this pretty old article from Computerworld only detects about 20 % of new malware.

2. A lot of malware is outside the OS and thus outside the reach of the anti-virus
   For example, rootkits are literally undetectable for anti-viruses. The insanely harmful pieces of malware usually use security weaknesses of the hardware itself and that‘s a pretty big problem.

3. Real-time analysis is very hard on resources
   This is especially hard for notebooks, where you can either decide to have a feeling of being secure or good battery life. And if you have an older notebook it may even feel unusable.

4. Security packages include so many programs that they became a threat themselves.
   You don‘t believe me? Just look at what happened to Avast recently. Source where they had malware in their own tool – Ccleaner.dicine worse than the illness?