Neowin.net

Why do you even have it in the first place?

Indeed. Only Norton products are worse. Any IT department recommending either of these should be SACKED.

Don't know if I'd say "only" Norton is worse," but as far as the 3 worst pieces of software ever written in history, McAfee, Norton, and AOHELL are THEE top 3!!

That's how I read it too. The comments above actually made me reread it in fact, thinking that,"Hey, maybe they all read it correctly and I somehow misread." But no, just people simply reading the title and posting...

you are right, is exactly what their saying that their AV and any others are not any use of new virus detect system and even worse on protecting a 0-day

i hope they and the others innovate the system, its to easy to build some random virus code and spread it without any AV detecting it, by what we can see in virus list on the AV their always N versions of the same virus simply because anyone with 1 version can simply use any freeware encrypting programs or compacting to be totally new signature

its time to innovate, one company (sorry don't remember what their name) developed an "AV" that relies not on signatures of virus but on signatures (md5 system i believe) of the programs themselfs

i know that is not the best solution to have a online database of Safe files signatures being one reason that the program we are running aren't their yet or simply if some user don't have Internet connection

lets see if their improve altogether, even if almost no one admit it, Vista UAC stops many spreads and helped some bit on this war against virus

The reason I sang the "buy our crap" song is because I'll bet they're getting ready to release something that will supposedly solve all the 'woes' in this article.

No AV is one of the stupidist things you could do...

We have spam filtering, a pathetic AV, and we're all IT technicians in our office. It's our business... we still managed to get infected with the Bravia virus... still to this day we didn't know how it got in...

While I can see this point of view, I also only have AV on my desktop, but not on my laptop. I generally only use my laptop for school related work so I don't view it as a big thing to have. I've been without AV on it for almost a year now and if I have some sort of virus/malware/etc, it's not affecting my laptop's performance, and so far as I know, nobody's stolen any identifying info off of it (if I have any stored, not sure on that one). If I ever do get a virus, I don't have anything sensitive enough that I'd regret losing by reverting to the manufacture state of the laptop.

So what's stupid about this scenario. I'm actually saving battery life by not having AV constantly running in the background. Yes, I know you can disable that function, but I don't much see the point of having AV if you aren't going to let it catch something as it hits, rather than after you've figured out it's messing up your system.

-Spenser

I'm sure he hasn't forgotten. However, when you're in the security business, and, I would imagine, getting complaints from businesses saying,"Hey, we still get viruses even with your bulls---!" it makes sense to take a moment to explain that there's more to it than simply having an antivirus.

It's like expecting the built in firewall on XP to stop all intruders. Granted, you pay for an antivirus and it should do SOMETHING, it just can't be the only defense you have.

We resell Sophos. However a German ran company we do work for insisted we use install McAfee for them. Currently we have had to install just the client on the workstations with no central server as their management products don't support Windows 2008. That said neither does Sophos. I still wouldn't use McAfee though.

agreed.

If you don't have any antivirus, how would you know if you became infected?

How do you know that you aren't infected, AV or not?

simply by plugging in an infected friend's usb-based drive (even an iPod or camera). you don't know how many infected flash drives my friends have connected to my computer and the AV has done a pretty good job. it would be wise electric-taping our usb ports either, in order to keep an "Antivirusless" computer safe.

note, I have removable drive autoplay disabled and still virus warnings manage to pop up.