The need of downloading anything might be the point of that game, but people spreading viruses also like playing that way.
I might have agreed with you 15 years ago, back in the age of antivirus and such.
The parent commenter is suggesting the random file may be malicious, not that their unzip utility or pdf viewer is untrustworthy.
They are further suggesting that the data contained within the zip could be distributed in a fashion that is less commonly weaponized (PDF is a common attack vector, zip is a common obfuscation method).
>I might have agreed with you 15 years ago, back in the age of antivirus and such.
What does this even mean? You still need antivirus today.
Today's AV has to be more than it was in the past to be a successful shield, hence products like CYNET or CrowdStrike.
I still run AV at home on all systems, because I agree with you. AV is still needed and people without it...well, I wish them success.
An AV is a waste of system resources unless you're a fool that's easily convinced into opening things you shouldn't.
Did Malware write this? lol
Meanwhile, I know plenty of people WITH antivirus and other shit with utterly compromised and slow shit. We can blame the user behavior instead of the antivirus, naturally, but how do we know the AV is protecting the user and not luring them into a sense of security so that they do risky things?
I'm clearly doing something right.
I think that you underestimate the capabilities of modern malware, and overestimate the capabilities of the average lazy person.
Modern malware doesn't need this "download and execute" flow to activate. It exploits vulnerabilities in browsers and browser components to achieve arbitrary code execution. One click required (the one that leads you to the malware) [1].
A malware flow with manual downloading that leaves persistent breadcrumbs on your computer has more opportunities where a "real-time protection" antivirus can detect and stop the threat, so it's no longer the norm outside email attachments.
[1] https://github.blog/2023-09-26-getting-rce-in-chrome-with-in...
It can't provide value to laypeople who're cutoff from the internet if all that's passed around is a URL.