Yes, you are extremely biased, and not in any of the good ways.
1. There's plenty of malware out there for Linux. The only difference is the delivery method - i.e., attacks against service endpoints (web apps, mail transfer agents, DNS servers, and so on) instead of user agents (web browsers, mail user agents, file managers, and so on).
2. Detecting novel malware isn't some dark magic only practiced by antivirus vendors such as yourself. People are capable of detecting when their computers behave oddly. These detections do not require antivirus or even particularly clueful users.
3. Antivirus can't see into the future. Novel malware can sneak past Malwarebytes, VirusScan, etc. because detections get created only _after_ someone notices something hinky (point #2 above). Put another way, it always amazes me how many smart people, who know a lot about computers, think that antivirus will make you immune to malicious code injection attacks delivered through user agents such as a web browser. Novel malware gets written /constantly/.
4. As with antivirus, "safe habits" (privilege separation, data execution prevention, content filtering, etc.) greatly reduce the risk of a successful attack. In fact, I'd argue that safe habits alone will have a lower risk of successful attack than antivirus alone, given some set of threats and vulnerabilities. I'd go a step further and aver that solely making it difficult to be socially engineered will approach the effectiveness of antivirus alone (but here my own biases are showing: I admit to lacking the data and analysis to back up that claim).
Those of you running Linux or Mac OS X are most certainly _not_ exempt from this minirant.
Comments
Yes, you are extremely biased, and not in any of the good ways.
1. There's plenty of malware out there for Linux. The only difference is the delivery method - i.e., attacks against service endpoints (web apps, mail transfer agents, DNS servers, and so on) instead of user agents (web browsers, mail user agents, file managers, and so on).
2. Detecting novel malware isn't some dark magic only practiced by antivirus vendors such as yourself. People are capable of detecting when their computers behave oddly. These detections do not require antivirus or even particularly clueful users.
3. Antivirus can't see into the future. Novel malware can sneak past Malwarebytes, VirusScan, etc. because detections get created only _after_ someone notices something hinky (point #2 above). Put another way, it always amazes me how many smart people, who know a lot about computers, think that antivirus will make you immune to malicious code injection attacks delivered through user agents such as a web browser. Novel malware gets written /constantly/.
4. As with antivirus, "safe habits" (privilege separation, data execution prevention, content filtering, etc.) greatly reduce the risk of a successful attack. In fact, I'd argue that safe habits alone will have a lower risk of successful attack than antivirus alone, given some set of threats and vulnerabilities. I'd go a step further and aver that solely making it difficult to be socially engineered will approach the effectiveness of antivirus alone (but here my own biases are showing: I admit to lacking the data and analysis to back up that claim).
Those of you running Linux or Mac OS X are most certainly _not_ exempt from this minirant.