Too Much Virus Hype

from the well,-duh dept

Tue, Mar 6th 2001 1:50pm — Mike Masnick

An executive from Trend Micro finally admitted that the anti-virus software community hypes viruses too much. Of course, Trend Micro has been one of the bigger hypers over the past few years. This is the argument that the guy behind Vmyths.com has been arguing about for years - and it's one of the reasons that I tend to rely on the information at that site more than any of the big virus warnings.

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Ed, 6 Mar 2001 @ 2:00pm

Virus Software Considered Pointless
I personally stopped running any virus checking software a while ago. It's my opinion that these signature-checking anti-virus programs were useful back in the days when installing software meant carrying a floppy disk from one machine to another, but since viruses today get spread at the speed of the Internet (or, more accurately, the speed of Microsoft Outlook), it's impossible to keep anti-virus software up to date with the latest stuff. Rather, it's much wiser to avoid doing risky things (like downloading cracked warez from newsgroups, or opening any suspicious email attachments). Combine that with personal firewall software that detects suspicious activity rather than specific virus signatures and that's all the protection you'll ever need.

However, I hesitate to tell the general public to drop their virus checking software. Here the analogy to biological viruses is appropriate -- as long as most people keep running their outdated virus scanners, they'll keep any ancient viruses from spreading again. If everyone were to stop, some of those nasty old buggers would come back to haunt us.
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Mike (profile), 6 Mar 2001 @ 2:42pm

Re: Virus Software Considered Pointless
Actually, that's a good point, which I tend to agree with. The only time virus checkers ever helped me out was many years ago when they would catch macro viruses in attached spreadsheets or word processed documents... I've also noticed that most anti-virus software programs are memory hogs.
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