Antivirus software completely pointless?

DatabaseError

-TangleFoot- wrote: »

If anything, flood insurance has more in common with the likes of Norton Ghost than any anti-virus application. Your analogy doesn't hold water.

...unlike his house

Humphrey10

Flooding ruins your house, which is hard to fix.

Getting a virus is much easier to fix, just wipe your hard drive (or get a new one) and reinstall everything. This shouldn't cause you a problem, you shouldn't be keeping important data just on one PC anyway, you could lose it in so many ways, eg a virus etc, or if someone steals it or if your house burns down with it inside!

frivolous_fay

I agree with the 'stupidity shield' observation.

I had a call the other day from a colleague. The problem, in a nutshell:
'Every web site suddenly tells me I need adobe. You updated some software recently, so it must be something you've done. I need to access these sites for my work. What are you going to do about it?'

The explanation, in a nutshell:
'You have apparently managed to download, install and start using chrome without realising. The chrome flash plugin has not been installed. This explains your errors.'

Some people will click on anything that says 'click here', no matter what it is!

gjchester

Humphrey10 wrote: »

Flooding ruins your house, which is hard to fix.

Getting a virus is much easier to fix, just wipe your hard drive (or get a new one) and reinstall everything. This shouldn't cause you a problem, you shouldn't be keeping important data just on one PC anyway, you could lose it in so many ways, eg a virus etc, or if someone steals it or if your house burns down with it inside!

Reminds me of the sketch where the owner talk to the dog and the dog just hears "woof"

IE what anyone in IT says (repeatedly....) Backup your important data just in case

What the public actually hear is "don't bother, just click blindly on everything you can, open all files you recieve regardless of who they are from or where they come from, then expect a friend to give up a few hours of his weekend trying to recover your unbacked up photo's of little jonny that you have no other copies of and generally pull all your important document out of the mess you made because you can't follow my instructions. Oh and please do it on Friday night so you can wreck my weekend plans as you suddenly need the photo's to show granny"

PROLIANT

Still missing the sodding point here!

B A C K U P Y O U R D A T A !

gjchester

PROLIANT wrote: »

Still missing the sodding point here!

B A C K U P Y O U R D A T A !

Sorry Not big enough. I know it, you know it, most of the people on the thread know it, Joe public doesn't.

RobTang

I think the OP is focusing too much on semantics, its like saying pencils are pointless because we have ink pens now.
They are both slighty different but in this context they basicly do the same job these days.

I used to joke AV programs (like the old version of norton) protected your system by making it totally unusable, but these days my pc's cpu usage barely hits 1% idling and only about 10% when forcing a scan, so i just run it anyway, being careful about what you use will only take you so far.

jaygomez

AV is not worthless. If you don't have AV in your system then maybe you already catched some less threatening virus with you knowing it. Or maybe some of your information already sent out but you never got to know.

It's like saying car insurance isn't worth it because year in and year out you never had any accident.

Laz123

What happens if you back up your data and it's got a virus, worm or trojan hidden in it?

mr_fishbulb

Humphrey10 wrote: »

Flooding ruins your house, which is hard to fix.

Getting a virus is much easier to fix, just wipe your hard drive (or get a new one) and reinstall everything. This shouldn't cause you a problem, you shouldn't be keeping important data just on one PC anyway, you could lose it in so many ways, eg a virus etc, or if someone steals it or if your house burns down with it inside!

Viruses have changed in the last few years. They are no longer just an annoying piece of software running on your machine, moving your mouse around randomly, where the biggest problem to you is having to wipe your hard drive and reinstall.

Malware is all about the money nowadays. It will steal passwords to your banks, stock trading sites, online games where items can be traded in the real world. It can take you months to recover money from fraud.

Your machine can be used to send spam, host pornographic websites or attack other computers.

It won't be long until a court case somewhere finds a computer user partially liable for a botnet client running on their machine taking down a company because they failed to adequately protect themselves.

You may well be one of the lucky ones that hasn't been infected yet, but why take the risk?