Are antivirus companies good or bad? This is one of those catch 22 questions. Here is one interesting perspective that most people don’t look at. If I were the antivirus company and I wanted to make sure that I was always in business, wouldn’t I write viruses and spread them so that people get infected, then write and antidote for them. This way I could charge people for this Antivirus / Antidote and make money off this EVERY YEAR.
Or here is another situation. If I don’t want to get my hands dirty, wouldn’t it make sense to hire rogue companies or agents to write these viruses so that they can spread them on the internet, then I can sell my antivirus removal database or tools and ALWAYS BE IN BUSINESS.
Even in our real world, I believe that some pharmaceutical companies actually develop viruses so that they can INVENT vaccines. This way they will never be out of business. In any business, in order to make it big, there must be a NEED and a SUPPLY. What if you wanted to speed things up, then you speed up the process of creating that need and just happen to have the supply on hand. It’s like knowing a natural disaster is going to hit, and having all the resoures to fulfill that demand when it happens.
Back to the issue at hand. Can we really trust these Antivirus Companies? In all our years of being in the Information Technology field, we’ve NEVER seen so far any major antivirus company go out of business. EVEN BANKS go out of business. Isn’t that something strange?
When a major virus spread who are the ones who ALWAYS BENEFIT? Surely not the innocent victims, but only the money hungry companies.
To keep your computer safe from virus, you simply keep it off the internet and be careful of the removable devices like floppies, cd’s, zip drives, thumb drives etc.
I’m not saying all of these companies are bad, I’m just saying it’s a very GREY AREA and many people don’t talk about it.
Join us for part 2 soon.
Glen