Comment by computerex
7 years ago
Uhh what? Software is probably more secure now than ever before. I don't think AV software is snake oil at all.
7 years ago
Uhh what? Software is probably more secure now than ever before. I don't think AV software is snake oil at all.
UEFI Secure Boot, mandatory signed binaries, and Windows Defender (XProtect on macOS), have contributed more to protecting from malware than 3rd party anti-virus. Although I think the existence, cost, and PITAness of 3rd party anti-virus might very well have contributed to motivating the OS vendors into securing their products better.
It should be noted, I believe the parent comments included Windows Defender as an anti-virus. 3rd party was never specified, and disabling Windows Defender can indeed improve file access performance.
Can confirm. I usually have to turn off windows defender whenever I'm doing anything with docker, or node modules, or something similar. If I don't, my computer slows to a crawl.
Source? I thought UEFI was just a way to make Linux a pain in the ass to dual boot with Windows? What's your evidence that it's effective against malware? I am biased here, and hate uefi.
UEFI is not the same thing as UEFI Secure Boot. UEFI booting in general makes dual-booting far easier than BIOS-based booting where operating systems have to fight over who owns the MBR. Secure Boot makes it harder to set up a multi-boot system because you need a signed bootloader for your Linux system.
Software maybe, but that has precious little to do with AV.
This sounds like anti vaxxer logic. I don’t think you remember what it was like before anti-virus.
I do remember, but correlation != causation. The major improvements that have made software so much more secure are not AV, they are things like ASLR, non-executable stack, stack canaries, a shift to less-privileged code and having more functions in user space, memory-safe(r) languages being more common place, and an increase in general security awareness. If anything anti-virus is much less useful now that polymorphic shell code is commonplace, as well as the fact that user error (such as falling for a phishing attack) is by far the largest cause of security failings.
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