What is Antivirus?
Antivirus software is a piece of software which you more than likely currently use. It scans files within your computer and checks said files against their database or with artificial intelligence in order to predict whether said file is malicious and harmful to run on your device. These programs used to be essential to people when they owned a computer as it would help defend the user against a large majority of trojans and other malware when installed on their computer. Now, what you may be wondering is why this blog was even made. Antivirus seems more or less an amazing software to use right? Wrong.
FUD Malware
One of the primary reasons I have begun to deem Antivirus software unnecessary in 2022 is due to the existence and growing existence of FUD malware. You may be asking yourself what FUD means. FUD stands for Fully Un-Detected which means that the file or malware in question here has used an exploit or has been encrypted in a fashion which bypasses and hides itself from any and all Antivirus. You may think that this would be quite a difficult task and therefore a rare occurance. Although this used to be the case a few years ago, in 2022 the situation is no where near the same. From my personal studies, a new method to make malware FUD is created extremely often and is frequently sold on underground forums. As a result of this, most if not all Antivirus software is deemed deprecated and almost pointless.
What Antivirus providers don’t tell you
Now you know why Antivirus is much less useful than it used to be, I’ll also tell you how the large majority of free Antivirus providers collect and sell information related to you through their products. From what I have seen first hand, nothing in this world is completely free. This is also proven true through most mainstream Antivirus companies collecting customer and user information through things such as their telemetry. One example of an Antivirus doing this is Malwarebytes. Although they are deemed one of the best Antivirus solutions, I have firsthand seen that they send a crazy amount of data to their servers. Within the time I have spent writing this article, 47 requests have been sent from my computer to telemetry.malwarebytes.com which is a domain they use for data collection. I intercept these requests with “Pi-Hole” which I have configured with privacy in mind. You can also do this to mitigate any data collection from these Antivirus companies and I highly recommend it.
Without Antivirus how do I protect myself?
You may be wondering how you would go about protecting yourself from malicious software and other forms of malware without the protection of Antivirus. From what I know, the best way to protect yourself is to just make sure what you are downloading is completely legitimate. A great way to do this is to triple check what domain you are downloading software from and make sure it’s official and even run an MD5 checksum against the file to make sure it is legitimate. An MD5 checksum checks the file hash for what you are trying to download and can be compared with the hash presented on the main website. If these hashes match then the file is mainly considered safe to run and if it doesn’t match it has likely been tampered with by a third party and should be avoided. In the end, when it comes to virus protection the main thing you really need is common sense. Don’t run sketchy files, don’t download things from random emails and just overall be careful online!
Conclusion
In conclusion, in 2022 Antivirus has been deemed way less effective in comparison to the years prior and it constantly gets less efficient as the years go by. This in no way means you shouldn’t be using it however. Your online protection should come with multiple layers of defence including everything I have stated above. Even Antivirus. I highly recommend looking further into protecting yourself against malware seeing as though the world is constantly developing more and more and with it the malware created by malicious people develops too. Thank you so much for reading and stay safe!
