CAN WE TRUST ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE?

There are a lot of free antivirus software and free versions of commercial anti-malware. Can we really trust these free antivirus programs?

Same question about commercial antivirus software. Maybe they install back doors on our computers?

Very true. Maybe they do.

However, there are many people with technical experience who are in a position to verify, either by monitoring for unexpected outbound connections or by reviewing the code, so we can be reasonably certain that they do not.

But think about the alternative: we know that malware installs back doors, etc., so from a risk-based perspective, which one would you prefer? A control that you personally haven't investigated, but approved by many others, or a lack of control that leaves you open to malware.

Pretty simple. Trust is not required, it is just up to you to balance the risk factors for your circumstances.

If you need some guidance, large companies use desktop and edge antivirus and antimalware, as well as antimalware on laptops and other endpoints. It's not cheap for them, so it's a risk-based decision to spend that money.

There is no more reason to expect that this software can get in through the back door than any other software. Your Internet browser could open a back door, your Word processor could, and your computer hardware could. Basically, you have to source your software and hardware from vendors that you trust and trust based on their reputation or from the review of many other users who have not yet encountered a problem.

You cannot trust anyone. But you have to for example, when you buy some food, you trust whoever produced it for not putting poison in it. It would certainly be feasible; however, it happens often enough to accept that risk, especially since the alternatives have their own costs and risks (hunting wild animals, foraging for berries, growing potatoes in your own field, or simply starving).

Likewise, every time you install a piece of software, any piece of software, you implicitly trust that it will not play bad tricks on you. Antivirus and antimalware are not special here and for that matter, the price (free or not free) doesn't matter much either. The software will have a back door if it is in the author's interest to plant back doors in his computer, and the author has sufficiently elastic moral values to enjoy such practices. The best interests the operative expression here. Here we point out that installing or not installing an antivirus is a question of risk (and its reduction). The risk analysis applies to attackers to: think about what an antivirus writer would gain and what would he risk losing by planting a backdoor in his product. Let's face it: hijacking your computer is unlikely to be a very attractive target that justifies any substantial effort for any attacker, let alone risking exposure to law enforcement agencies.

There is still a point here. Antivirus software is in a special class in the following sense: it is automatically updated very frequently. This also applies to web browsers. Apps that update automatically from a single source make that source a very valuable target for people who want to hijack many machines (not just yours, but millions of machines). The risk here is not that the antivirus author inserts a backdoor; rather, it is a bad guy hacking into the antivirus distribution server and replacing the update file with some nasty code.

Again, that antivirus is free or does not have a significant impact. What matters is whether the antivirus author knows how to protect his distribution server or not.

I have seen an instance where the virus actually installed in the antivirus signature folder. Since it did not scan its own virus signatures (this would only generate false positives), the actual virus remained undetected by it and was only found when the hard drive was connected as an external drive on another computer and scanned by someone else antivirus.

The real risk is not the real antivirus software, it is the 101 website trying to trick you into installing fake antivirus software. I know people who have received fake phone calls claiming to be from Microsoft or their ISP and they tell them that they have a virus and that they should do x, y and z. Then, software is installed that steals the bank's login details if they fall for it.

Only one in thousands of people has to follow these tricks to give a good return on investment to the people who are doing them.

Rear Doors

All "background" antivirus software installs backdoors on your machine, since they have to be updated, the question is whether you trust your vendors to not do something wrong with the backdoor and to prevent someone else from using it.

There is "batch mode" antivirus software that is downloaded to a machine and runs once before the program removes itself. These are primarily used when a virus has become very widespread, as they can be run as part of a maintenance cycle on all PCs.

Antivirus Software are really the one that we can use to keep our data safe and trust them for what work they are doing irrespective of free and paid. A free version of antivirus is given so that you can trust its working and know what it actually do.