Antivirus is much less effective than most people believe. The problem is that the AV is "entrenched" and the malware is "mobile"

Malware authors can simply tweak or repack their code until the AV engines don't detect it anymore.

Getting around behavioral detection is harder, but possible. If malware is privileged it becomes an arms race of who can hook lowest and who can disable who.

Agreed, I don't bother with AV software for myself anymore the performance penalty and nagging isn't worth it.

I tend to notice a correlation between people who have problems with malware/spyware/crapware and people who have AV software installed and it's the opposite of what you might expect. Perhaps people who install it get a false sense of security?

AV software tends to be either ineffective in that it doesn't detect a lot of actual malware or it is constantly generating a lot of false positives which people just learn to ignore "Tracking cookie detected! Your life is in danger!".

I think this is a necessity to justify AV to the masses. They have to find lots of "threats" to a) keep your average user scared into renewing every year and b) impress the owner that the application is so thorough. Look at this! it found all these cookies that could harm me! This software rocks!

> "Tracking cookie detected! Your life is in danger!"

That's the difference between Microsoft Security Essentials and commercial AV software. One is designed to just make the more OS secure, the other also needs to advertise its presence and appear to be "doing something".

Perhaps people who don't install it are much more likely to know what they're doing and avoid common sources of infection.

It's possible your correlation implies you simply aren't aware that you and others not running AV have a virus.

I'm more of a firewall guy myself.

The problem is that the behavior itself is rarely viral. What's the difference between this and, for example, gotomypc?