After being away working for a couple of months, I'm finally back. However, it's taken me the best part of a week to get my main desktop PC up to date. Every application seems to want to install an update or security patch, and then reboot. Plus it seems a number of updates from Microsoft couldn't be installed first time round, so it took several goes with Windows Update to get that up to date.
What's more, my usual anti-virus program fired off a warning about a couple of files being potential trojans. Now, the two files in question have been on my PC for about 4 years, so I'm not clear why they are suddenly a risk. Perhaps if there was some other evidence of infection, I could understand that these files had been altered, but there wasn't. So, I fired up an anti-malware tool (which was installed after getting infected about 6 months ago - so clearly my AV/AM tools weren't doing their job), which of course needed updating and another reboot. This identified several different threats - one appeared to be the remains of an earlier malware infection, and again, a couple of files (not the same at the anti virus app) were identified as being trojans. I've also run an anti spyware app, which, you guessed it, picked up some other stuff, but not what the anti-virus or anti-malware apps identified.
Now, I know I've got some files on my machine which are packaged using technologies which these programs can't decompress and look inside, so they tend to flag them as warnings, but what's suddenly changed to make files I've used before (many years before) harmful now, but OK last week? And why do they all produce different results? And finally, why is it nearly impossible to find any information about the identified threats? (One app links to a generic virus search page, and the names of the viruses/trojans/etc seem to be unique to each vendor.)
I'm beginning to wonder whether these programs are actually any use, or whether they randomly pick some things to flag up as threats just to make you think they're doing their job and scare you into persisting with them or even shelling out cash on the next upgrade or wizz-bang feature. Right now, I don't trust them, and that's bad for both me and them.
PS OK, I wouldn't actually run my Windows machine without some kind of AV software running, and I don't recommend you do either. And don't give me the usual line about Linux - I run Linux too, but need to run Windows for some stuff. And as/when Linux develops the same market share as Windows, we'll suddenly find the malware creators start targetting Linux, regardless of how fancy and secure the Linux architecture is.
