The interesting bit here is that modern viruses don't ever make themselves known. They aren't there to prank you or make your life more difficult, they are there to steal your login credentials for financial sites, to be proxy servers to mask people who are trying to avoid having their IP address revealed, to send spam or do reflective DDOS attacks on third party sites. You'll never know they are there, unless you're system is slow one day because its doing your work and the virus owner's work at the same time.
Re:Ask HN: Do you use an antivirus?
by thaumaturgy on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @02:26PM
(#10118558)
> The interesting bit here is that modern viruses don't ever make themselves known.
Not disagreeing with your main point, but this bit is a bit statistically wrong, in my experience. (See also my comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10118516) We see a lot more malware that is obvious -- or, would be to a more technically savvy user -- and a lot less malware that's being really sneaky.
But there is still a lot of sneaky malware and to the extent that you're saying that people shouldn't trust that they aren't infected just because they aren't noticing anything out of the ordinary, you're completely right.
Now I live at a place whose internet requires me to have an antivirus installed. It's super annoying--Avira on Mac. It keeps popping up and telling me it's keeping me safe and I keep thinking "the gall of these people..."
(One might suggest simply disabling certain annoying features, but my God, university internet.)