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Comment by integricho | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting point. Could AV become obsolete in the future, provided the security of OSes becomes good enough?

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AVs have been obsolete in every way imaginable when it comes to offense. As another comment said, they're less effective than band-aids - not only they can be bypassed almost trivially, they increase attack surface.

> not only they can be bypassed almost trivially,

Sounds almost crazy but I agree as I saw some 17y.o. students I taught who created a simple, autoupdating undetected .exe trojan in autohotkey in an evening or so.

I haven't installed an antivirus program since Microsoft released their Security Essentials / Windows Defender pairing in Vista. I think we're already there -- it's just taking time to reverse the years of beating the antivirus drum into the common perception.

MS seems to think so, they have been pushing their own security product in Win8+

https://movietvtechgeeks.com/microsoft-antivirus-cant-defend...

Since XP / Vista, actually. Windows 8 is when they integrated Microsoft Security Essentials into Windows Defender as a full OS component.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Security_Essentials

Also on Win 10 Anniversary onwards they are pushing more sandboxing in form of device guard and secure kernel.

Basically as a evolution of MinWin, there is now a micro-kernel for security critical code sandboxed via HyperV.

AV is already obsolete as far as I can tell.

AV was obsolete 15 years ago at least.

iOS does reasonably well

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