You Don't Need an Antivirus (Except Microsoft's Built-in on Windows), Says Former Firefox Developer (ocallahan.org)

Former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan believes that antivirus software is not necessary, AV vendors are of little help, and that you should uninstall your antivirus software immediately. From a blog post: Users have been fooled into associating AV vendors with security and you don't want AV vendors bad-mouthing your product. AV software is broadly installed and when it breaks your product, you need the cooperation of AV vendors to fix it. (You can't tell users to turn off AV software because if anything bad were to happen that the AV software might have prevented, you'll catch the blame.) When your product crashes on startup due to AV interference, users blame your product, not AV. Worse still, if they make your product incredibly slow and bloated, users just think that's how your product is.

Comments

This is obvious even to AV vendors

[The-Ixian]

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. You rarely get "just AV" when you install an AV product these days. You end up with a whole suite of value added applications like password managers, system optimizers, registry cleaners, web site scanners, IPS and content filters, etc.

The reactionary system we have been living in was never very good. Relying on signatures to detect malware is a fundamentally flawed system. As the operating systems and, more importantly, the applications that run on them become increasingly secure, the need for the signature-based AV systems declines.

Any AV software company has seen this coming for a long time. At least I would hope they have.

Re:hyper-v and don't install chrome extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

Another benefit of using a virtual machine is just powering it off when you are finished and having it reset to the last snapshot. Every month or so apply patches and move your snapshot forward.

Re:AV Free for years

[tepples]

Holes in the user's general security intelligence.

None of those are solved by adding ANOTHER software suite.

Not even whitelist-based security tools that allow only vetted applications to run? I thought that was the point behind Apple's App Store, game consoles' app stores, and the PC Matic tool for Windows.

Re:AV is a joke

[FyRE666]

Exactly. I do the same, if we get a new PC with commercial AV installed (usually some trial) it's the first thing I uninstall to installing improve disk performance by 50-100%. The Windows 10 built-in AV works fine and doesn't make a PC perform like it has a 5400rpm drive from 2001, instead of a modern SSD.

Duh

[Khyber]

AV products actually make you less secure. They act as a MITM, replacing certificates with their own and totally defeating the purpose of TLS/HTTPS.