When I was younger, the standard windows firewall was seen as weak and worth replacing asap with premium or strong free anti viruses, like Avast. What changed to make Windows Defender competitive? It looks like a few years ago something suddenly happened and now everybody on the market has great protection.
In: Technology
I think the responses that give a clear answer are overconfident.
For home users, AV is useless. For home users that download and run “penis enlargement pills buy now.exe”, AV is still useless, because it’s reactive to novel threats, and malware developers aren’t inert, they know AV exists and plan accordingly. You aren’t going to click on spam from 12 years ago. For enterprise users, maybe it makes sense as ass-covering against frivolous lawsuits, but actual security depends on sysadmins. I maintain that it didn’t make sense then and it doesn’t make sense now to get an antivirus, and nothing really changed except companies’ marketing and people’s whims. It’s a scam, and it’s better analyzed as a scam, not as a good sold in a market. The Blaster worm was the only possible problem a sane Windows user could have encountered, and AV did nothing to stop it, and it was mildly annoying at best.
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