Ask HN: Do you build your own antivirus? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you build your own antivirus?

Do I really need antivirus software? I'm pretty good at telling apart safe from hazardous URLs and Websites. And MS Defender never caught a single virus/piece of malware anyway in all those years.

The goal being reducing a lot of the background work constantly being done on my Windows machine, which makes it real loud for seemingly no good reason whatsoever, as if I was mining Bitcoin when I'm just surfin' the damn web.

Is it enough to "build" your own antivirus by simply blocking some hosts and being otherwise careful, and disabling Windows Defender? Do you guys do that?

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> MS Defender never caught a single virus/piece of malware anyway in all those years.

How do you know? MS Defender just doesn't advertise itself with warning popups every other day because it's not Microsoft's business model. Not to mention it likely isn't even close to being the most resource draining part of Windows.

> The goal being reducing a lot of the background work constantly being done on my Windows machine, which makes it real loud for seemingly no good reason whatsoever, as if I was mining Bitcoin when I'm just surfin' the damn web.

Well if you don't want it to sound like a Bitcoin miner turning off the antivirus isn't going to help. The more likely reason for the fans spinning up are bloated websites.

> bloated websites.

Bingo. If anything, the best thing you could do for security and performance on your computer would be to get pretty strict about ad blocking. I am not even concerned at all about the “privacy” aspect that obsess some people (“OH NO, I start to get car ads when I’ve been shopping for cars, creepy big brother!!!”), I just push back really hard on the state we are in where when you load a webpage of any kind today. About 0.5% of the CPU cycles, RAM, and bandwidth are being used to render the contact you’re there for, 20% to parse 187 npm packages that the front end developers decided they needed to load at all times, and the remaining 79.5% is used for various forms of adtech. Like, how do I need 72 MB of code to display a single article from CNN or something?

I agree that it’s very possible that you don’t really need any kind of native virus scanning software especially if you don’t click links from random strangers or hang out on seedy parts of the web likely to have 0-day exploits on them (and you’re blocking ads too, since it’s not unheard of for that actors to buy us to direct traffic to their 0-day exploits)

> contact => content

> that actors => bad actors

> buy us => buy ads

I deeply apologize for trying to use Apple's abysmal dictation or its swipe keyboard, whichever was responsible for this

>The goal being reducing a lot of the background work constantly being done on my Windows machine, which makes it real loud for seemingly no good reason whatsoever, as if I was mining Bitcoin when I'm just surfin' the damn web.

Specs? If it’s a desktop PC then what case and how many fans? Did you try adjusting the fan curves or undervolting?

My PC is dead silent (i5-13600k) and pretty much all desktop PC can be made more silent either hardware or software way.

But honestly if the default antivirus has this big effect on your PC then you have some bigger problems. By default it’s basically not using any CPU at all.

You can turn off background scans in your group settings without getting rid of the entire thing.

1. Run gpedit.msc

2. Navigate to administrative templates -> windows components -> Microsoft defender antivirus -> real-time protection -> turn off real-time protection

3. Set 'enabled'

Do you have something going on in the background for it to be scanning? Some kind of weird browser that mines attention coins of checks every byte against a block list API of forbidden octal values? IPFS? An actual virus that it didn't catch that does in fact mine Bitcoin?

Why is MS defender doing that? Microsoft is a billion dollar company, and it's not like they don't make any effort to have good performance.

I sure would look for just about any other solution before even thinking of trying to hack together an alternative for a common piece of complex software.

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