Anti-virus vendors are intercepting and analyzing your HTTPS traffic
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KissSh0t
The plot thickens.
sverek
I have feeling antiviruses becoming obsolete. Antivirus doesn't defend you, they scare you, collect your data, break your programs and back to scaring. All for greater profit.
Customers just happy to have antivirus as a morale support.
Unfortunately, antivirus also doesn't cure stupidity. Customer can't just be stupid and rely on antivirus to cover up while it do all stupid things on PC.
21th century is about not being stupid online. Sharing USBs and CDs with your friends as we did in 20th century is not very common anymore. So there less and less work for antivirus to actually cover.
Extraordinary
Mozilla really want you to uninstall your AV lately, makes me suspicious of Mozilla not my AV
lucidus
That's it? Despite the sample size that seems pretty low. The degradation of security stuff is higher within those stats but still. Why is it so low? Upto 89.1% connections didn't use third party security software?
That was one ex-Mozzarella.
Extraordinary
I'm suspicious of all pizzerias advising the removal of security software too
SirDremor
Probably you should change yours.
Antivirus I install on my mother's PC does everything the opposite, it protects from viruses, reasures user, has option preventing the collection of data, doesn't break anything, and don't scare user.
But I can send you a tinfoil hat, it has 100% protection from anything you are scread of. Free of charge.
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Back to topic - regarding HTTPS - yes, the methods are questionable, and I do not justify antivirus companies in any way. My antivirus, thanksfuly, gives at least an option to use or not to use the corresponding option.
UPDATE: Just noticed these came from Mozarella guys. Well, I completely disregards these dumbheads, they started this Anti-AV vengeance with some hidden motive. Hope they collapse soon.
TheDeeGee
I'm glad i'm not paranoid about my privacy, else i had to live in cave as caveman again :S
justdoge
I wonder whos behind this new anti-antivirus propaganda. 1st time I heard about it it was google saying software should be replaced by hardware solutions. all this looks fishy af and feels like typical deface and consumer conditioning. software can be uninstalled. hardware will be another backdoor soldered on the mobo you will not be able to deactivate. beware
fantaskarsef
That graphic shown at the bottom is funny: Grades are only A, C, and F without anything in between.
They give an A* rating to an AV that doesn't even support the most common browsers.
They didn't even test Norton's AV / Internet security, did they?
To be honest, I think it's a witch hunt. Certainly it's a problem, but without such studies people probably wouldn't have known about it. And the last big botnet they uncovered was on machines that weren't even using HTTPS connections I think ('smart' houshold things like TVs etc.).
Alessio1989
Antimalwares are scams. There is nothing new here.
PrMinisterGR
It's not a scam, but by doing things like these they only create more attack surfaces instead of less. Someone mentioned their mom. I would use either Chrome OS, or the UWP-only version of Windows when it's out.
Alessio1989
Antimalwares are legalized rootkits (by Versign & co).
They act like rootkits: they do not add at all any extra protection that modern OS does, but they expose your system to extra vulnerabilities since they have level 0 access, they have kernel patching capabilities 'cause EU antitrust is ****, they slow down the entire system adding unnecessary overhead, they do not protect your privacy at all but instead they have full access to every kind of personal information on your system, and they are prone to false positive by nature.
rl66
it's not scam, it's wizard to do in 1 click what most of us do by ourself in registery and hiden files.
rl66
this is THE malware OS 🙂 (share everything with us... it's for your happyness)
fantaskarsef
I'm surprised people bring up privacy as to what AV's are supposed to protect... never did I install an AV because of privacy concerns... whoever thought that an AV would help you defend your privacy didn't get what an ANTI VIRUS PROGRAM is for in the first place, sorry. It's not called 'privacy protection software' after all, and who is stupid enough to hand over their passwords to some kind of 'safe' (offered with many AV suites) asks for that to be exploited...
Inquisitor
When you say most, I assume you mean the 0.001% of the population that do that?
You having the knowledge to completely lock down your OS from any known or unknown attack/virus are very much in the minority.
The elitism in the tech world is shocking. I bet most people that think they know what they are doing just put themselves more at risk because they are blind to their own incompetence.
I'm not defending the bad or immoral practices of the AV Vendors but for the majority of uneducated or unskilled users they do play an important role at helping protect the end users. Mostly from themselves just googling crap and clicking on anything that comes up!
schmidtbag
This is great news. Yet one more reason to convince people to stop using this scammy crapware.
Funny to me how many people install these programs because they thought they were being protected from this activity.
Blindly relying on one of these programs to protect you is equally, if not more stupid, because it encourages bad behavior and they are NOT 100% reliable. A tech enthusiast who claims he/she never gets an infection is equally as ignorant as someone with an AV program that claims the same thing. The only difference is an enthusiast well-acquainted with their PC would notice something wrong.
It's much better to do things safely than to depend on safety equipment. When you go into the military and put on a bullet-proof vest, that doesn't mean it's ok to just run out into the open; you're still less likely to get killed going in wearing jeans and a T-shirt as long as you don't do anything reckless.
Mineria
How many % of installled AV's out there belong to the C and F grades? :banana:
Mineria
Spot on, best protection is a hardened system and a default deny everything new on the system and run in an isolated sandbox instead.
One can then do the needed research to validate and white-list what may be safe.
Traditional AV protection doesn't really help against fresh new code and HIPS have their weaknesses too, a virtual sandbox can be hacked of cause, but it's way harder than working around other protection.
trentbg
Haven't had an anti-virus program on any of my PCs in the last 14 years, other than the build in MS one, complete waste of money and resources.
