Tearing Apart a Hard-Sell Anti-Virus Ad 192
climenole writes "I came across an email sent by a security vendor, reminding me, no urging me with the liver-transplant sort of urgency, to renew my subscription to their product, lest my pixels perish. I spent a minute or two staring at the email, thinking about all the poor souls out there who do not have the comfort of being a geek and who may actually take the advertisement seriously." That led to this insightful deconstruction of these over-the-top ads, the kind that make it hard to keep straight the malware makers and the anti-malware makers.
It's not "insightful" (Score:1, Interesting)
He's a pedant.
Sure, he may make a good point in the last paragraph, but the first few points he makes are stupid.
Spam exclusion (Score:2, Interesting)
Little known, though highly comical peice of info, is back in the day the McAfee spam filter constantly triggered on the McAfee advertising emails. You'd think the marketing guys would have figured out their techniques needed adjustment... but instead the smart ones at the top demanded a fix... so the engineers built an exclusion into the software for anything coming from the company... becuase clearly that was the right course of action. I'm not at all surprised their 'emails' can't be distinguished from Phishing spam after all these years.
Expired AVs do popups, not emails (Score:3, Interesting)
The flurry of popup windows you get when an AV expires, along with all the dire warnings from Windows Security Center, won't leave you in any doubt about the status of your antivirus. No email required.
The bigger the vendor, the more "Insert credit card now!" message you'll get.
Re:So you know they're there (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess it all depends on what you expect an "anti-virus" program to do. I'm only concerned with Avast looking for viruses and none of the other things listed in the link you posted. ESET detected 183 viruses vs. 182 by Avast, which is virtually identical. Kapersky only detected 105, which makes Avast better in my mind.
I pretty much gave up on NOD32 on my work system when it got hit with Winfixer and ESET missed it. Spybot had no problems with it though and also detected several hundred other trojans that NOD32 missed.
In regards to worms, I rely on Zone Alarm and a hardware firewall.
I guess the difference is that I am not looking for a all encompassing security solution as IME there really isn't one short of turning off all network connectivity.
And I totally agree with you that it's ridiculous that all of this third party software is needed just to keep a Windows system functional.