Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
A virus was very much on my radar because whatever search terms I'd thrown into Google when looking for a solution resulted in the very first hits containing a warning of a white screen virus. It was only when I noticed that I wasn't getting a "no signal" warning from my monitor when I turned the pc off that it finally dawned on me that my monitor had gone to the great beyond. Originally I had planned to lug my PC into the shop. Sure am glad I didn't put myself through all those changes.  |
Viruses aren't on my radar because I don't get them.
I'm contrary, and do not follow the revealed wisdom on this stuff. I do
not run anti-virus or active anti-malware software on Windows.
My thoughts crystallized a while back. I had been running Symantec Corporate A/V, under a site license from my then employer. (The Corporate version never caused a problem. I would not touch the Norton consumer A/V product with a stick.) The version I was running had reached EOL, and would not get virus signature updates. I no longer worked for that employer, so a new version would be on my dime.
The only things Symantec had "caught" since I ran it were "false positives", like deciding after an update that some old MS-DOS programs I still used were infected and quarantining them. (Okay, figure out to tell Symantec "Don't scan
this directory!", then reinstall the quarantined programs.)
I view viruses and malware as infections. Infections have vectors by which they enter the host. Ward the vector, and block the infection.
The primary vector for viruses is email. I use Gmail as my primary account, and it polls the others, so all mail appears in my Gmail Inbox. I prefer the web interface, and have no need for a local copy of mail, so my mail all lives on Google's servers, along with any potentially nasty attachments. Google has viewers for all common attachment types, so I can view attachments without downloading and opening them on my machine. And Gmail has the best spam filters I've seen, with perhaps one piece of spam every couple of weeks hitting my Inbox. Click "Report spam", and I don't see mail from that source again. And Gmail's spam filters catch the stuff likely to have problematic content.
Everything I download comes from known-good sites that scan on their end.
So I said "Do I
need to run A/V software?" and concluded that I
didn't. I'd warded the vector.
Malware's vector is the browser. I don't run IE. I run Firefox, with the NoScript addon that blocks scripting unless the site is in a user maintained whitelist. It defaults to blocking JavaScript, but can block Silverlight and Java as well.
I don't run "active" anti-malware software that loads resident and does real time blocking. I do have the Malware Bytes scanner, and run it occasionally to do an on-demand scan. It never finds anything. I warded the vector.
(I also run Linux, where viruses are a non-issue.)
Antivirus and anti-malware software all assume you will be infected and attempt to treat the illness if you are. I find it easier to not get infected.
My strategy works for me. I know people who for whom it wouldn't work, like a chap who gets lots of stuff from Usenet "binary" newsgroups. He runs A/V, and if I did, I would too. They are yawning morasses of infection.
Whether it will work for anyone else is a question they need to answer depending on what they do, but they need to thing through what they are protecting against and what protection is required. They might just discover they don't need it, or need a different form than what they have.
______
Dennis