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Comment by steven2012 | Hacker News Reader

steven2012

Antivirus scans are one of those things added on IT checklists to cover their ass whenever something wrong happens.

But it rarely is useful. It only causes problems. We've seen so many issues related to virus scans throughout the years it's crazy.

What's better is to lock down the servers with only minimal access. I haven't used virus scan on my main desktop for over 10 years because I don't click on weird emails and I don't go to sketchy websites ever. Sure there's the risk of malware from ads I suppose, but I'm not that worried.

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Most of the time IT is just implementing policy from the CIO, which is basing it on the requirements of the company's insurers. Insurance companies require some very annoying things like Anti-virus. It's like having a lock on your office. You do it so the insurance company will pay you if someone comes in and steals your stuff.

It's more like the requirements cronies put into defense contracts to make sure the contractors make a lot of money.

The reason "security requirements" documents require antivirus is that companies like Symantec make sure they're in the right position to be the ones asked when someone is writing up a security requirements document, so that their answer can be "make sure you install antivirus (and here's the contact info for our volume licensing center)."

Yeah, you don't click on weird emails and don't go to sketchy websites. Try managing IT security for an enterprise of 10,000 employees. A/V will save your ass hundreds of times every single day.

Computer professionals rarely understand the use case for A/V precisely because they are not the use case. In most all applications, A/V serves first as a safeguard against stupid user behavior, and only second as a safeguard against more advanced penetration (and in the latter case, one with only rare success). I'd bet that the #1 way enterprises are getting breached is still malicious email attachments, that's certainly true in my experience.

> I haven't used virus scan on my main desktop for over 10 years because I don't click on weird emails and I don't go to sketchy websites ever.

Haha, I used to be like that as a teen in Windows 9x era until one day I ran tcpdump on the router ;)

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