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The situation is generally bad, AV vendors are often shady. However I think "vet your AV vendor" is much better advice.
Personally I don't use an AV, I am a bit paranoid and technical competent so my case and my relatives is totally different.
As always, it depends on the product that you are referring to. Purely by coincidence, I installed [product] again a few weeks ago, after having used Defender since Windows 10 launched. > see bugs in AV products listed in Google's Project Zero All software has vulnerabilities, including Defender. Searching for [product] in Project Zero shows that only 3 vulnerabilities have been discovered (which is arguably a bad th…
Most software doesn't run in ring0. And most software doesn't actively break exploit mitigation techniques in other software either.
It's irresponsible to make such a broad claim and back it up with really vague anecdotal evidence. Yes, there are a lot of lousy AV products that are at best a break-even for security, but there are some that don't suck and generally you have to pay for them - what a strange concept. I'm not going to advocate for any particular vendor as I used to work for an AV company (and currently use a product from a competitor)…
And the argument being made that "for example, see bugs in AV products listed in Google's Project Zero. These bugs indicate that not only do these products open many attack vectors" could be made for any piece of software your install.
I have the impression that the AV business is some kind of mixture of scam and mafia.
Users are to blame by pirating software. Of course, pirates don't do it for free.
I also want to raise an alarm about a current AV practice, not mentioned in the article: AV products like Bitdefender will MITM your HTTPS connections by installing their own root certificates, by default and without warnings In the name of "security", this undermines the very purpose of what HTTPS is about, knowingly endangering their users. And consider that I, a highly technical and security conscious software dev…
also you have installed an application that has a root acces to the pc, if it was mallicius it could do allot more damage. it is ultimately a question of trust.
i created and installed my own root certificate because i dont want clicking on the exception if i open a new incognito window, its especialy anoying for websocket connections.
This is my advice to everyone I know that gets a new Windows PC. Windows 10's built-in protection is more than adequate, and catches the majority of bad software - anything more is unnecessary, and many of the AV vendors are predatory.
It sucks that you cannot reset your Windows to MS-Vendor settings. For example if you get some Acer laptop and reset it using windows built-in functionality it'll still reset it with all the bloatware - including AV.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10s...
They've had similar tools since at least Windows 7 IIRC, if not XP - you've just always had to download them separately, and they've never been advertised with much enthusiasm. Probably trying to strike a balance between pleasing power-users and keeping the bundled-bloatware ecosystem happy, seeing as MS benefit financially from both.
Some good points. The antivirus software itself is probably an interesting attack vector. However I don't like the assertion that Microsoft scanners are sufficient without some evidence (and In wouldn't be shocked if the MS-AV software itself was exploitable, too). At least run some tests and compare a couple of state of the art products. The situation is generally bad, AV vendors are often shady. However I think "ve…