I dont use Antivirus now for more than 8yrs. I just know how to prevent viruses.

So how do you know that you do not have viruses if you do not have an anti-virus to tell you that? Just because your PC is working does not mean it does not have any viruses, unless of course you are offline and have never plugged in any external hard drives or flash drives, never witlessly connected to your phone hot spot or anything.

The simple fact that you are posting on devrant means you are vulnerable, no matter what you do. FYI, putting a condom on the network cable does NOT work.

Haha sorry didn't notice this. I thought i comment this to some rant. My bad.

Yeah im not sure if there were viruses on my laptop. But it works well and good as new. Because Antivirus slows down everything.

@saiphp and prevents viruses that are hidden and secretly steal all your password, credit cards and social security number. Completely undetectable without some sort of anti virus :)

Openly saying you have no antivirus on a community full of coders.. What could go wrong?

Installing Antivirus now. Haha

I havent used any antivirus for 6 years.

O_o

Ya, as I said, just because it works well doe snot mean there are no viruses, and its is not 1995, virus scanners these days use less than 1% of available resources.

Not installing it because it may potentially slow down you computer for a few seconds during the time it actually finds a virus, because it is destroying the virus that you think you do not have, is crazy.

Just to mention it AV Software doesn't necessarily make your PC safer.
There are a lot of papers on the conceptual weaknesses of AV concepts and if you consider that the absolute major part of viruses are still caught by clicking oh shity mails. Well I consider the layer 8 Problem bigger :)
And to all this "Webstuff" functions of some of these AV, keep in mind that the do shit like SSL connection interception ... well ... just think about it....
And last but not least AV are sometimes/often vulnerable themselves aaaand run with good bunch or privileges.

Please don't say you don't use condoms either. Not using AV is like saying you don't use condoms 'cause you "pull out" in time.

I dont use antivirus either. Whats the worst that could happen? Someone gets my online banking? One phone call to my bank about my stolen details and it all sorted. I love not having the bs that is antivirus on my pc.

#WindowsProblems

Prevention is better than cure.

@cst1992 shit, looks like i care more about my laptop than my life...can free version of Avast protect my gf from pregnancy?

Hmm, ever heard of drive-by viruses? Websites that are completely legit yet may have been breached. Adnetworks that have been breached or injected with malware etc etc.

Even if you know what you're doing, you're taking a large risk since it's easy to catch malware even though you know how to normally avoid one. For example even Spotify had ads that were injected with redirects to have malware downloaded.

@lcratox these drive-by scenarios burn often down to the assumption that AVs are faster than browsers with updates.
In general browsers are currently very well audited, make frequent updates and mostly comply with very coding and security standards. Things I won't say about the most AV software's.

@RTRMS Just because antivirus says you don't have any viruses doesn't mean much either. It often provides a false sense of security.

@RTRMS just because an anti-virus says your PC is fine means it is? I don't think so. There are so many things I've seen that get around it, like a chrome extension or a simple executable. The only way I know for sure is to run my sketchy programs on a VM.

@GigabyteDX If your bank is that obliging, I have a tip for you:
1) Open a few offshore accounts in various countries (Panama, Belize etc).
2) Transfer all you money to an offshore account. Then to another, then by way of e.g. bitcoin and back to actual money until you've crossed enough jurisdiction boundaries.
3) Call your bank and tell them your account was hacked, all you money is gone and you want them to "fix it".

Now, you've either doubled your savings or discovered that you've over estimated the benevolence of your bank.

Actually anti viruses are not secure and should not be used
http://amp.tomsguide.com/us/...

@solocoder I agree but don't base your opinion on one article

@solocoder nobody is saying they are a perfect solution, the simple fact is humans are coding them so they are bound to be imperfect, but rather something that works 99% of the time than nothing, you are still better off with an imperfect solution than no solution.

@calmyourtities @RTRMS I used to work at a security company (mostly firewalls but also provides a full solution powered by Kaspersky) most users were harmed by false positives and it didn't help saving people from ransomware since most of it is modified for each machine so signatures won't help and behavioral inspection takes a toll on the machine and causes even more false positives so it's disabled or non existent in most antiviruses.
Plus a research shows that antiviruses catch only up to 20% of viruses in the wild. So eventually antivirus gives you a false sense of security and helps with almost nothing.

I normally use Windows defender (which got pretty good compared to earlier versions) and malware bytes. Run them scheduled every day... But an active AV that always runs in the background. Didn't try one out...