>A ridiculous comparison. Seatbelts are not marketed as accident stoppers or preventers. They are marketed as a life-saving device in the event of an accident. i.e. they are a post-incident measure, not an incident preventative measure. AV is marketed as incident preventative measure. Your comparison is totally invalid.

Yes, I'm aware how ridiculous that statement was. But I find it equally ridiculous for a possible interpretation of your statement that one shouldn't bother to install any antivirus and antispyware software. Yes, I have seen the results of false sense of security that these products might produce -- but usually that's because what was deployed was not a very good one, and that users were being careless. One thing that most folks seem to realize is expecting a "deploy-and-forget" solution is unrealistic -- and that it does require periodic monitoring to make sure that you catch stuff before it gets out of hand.

An ineffective solution could prove to be more of a hinderance than a help. Back in the 1990s at the unversity I was at, they'd deployed a "watchdog" solution that would block users from accessing certain files. Unfortunately it didn't prevent common viruses from attacking the system. Scanning for and removing viruses was nearly impossible, -- even if I had the master passwords. It was easier to simply wipe the harddrive and restore an image -- which took about an hour or more to cmoplete. All it took was someone with an infected floppy to *unintentionally* tnfect 10 computers in less than 15 minutes (i.e. he was "simply tring to finish his assignment", but the computer's kept crashing on him, so he'd go to the next one).

Yes it's true that risks of virus and malware has much to do with habits -- that's one thing that's one thing that's hard to change with people. If it was a perfect world, you'd only have to tell everybody what to watch out for and you'd never have to remind them again. They'd also inform you at the earliest possible opportunity about something. As it stands, some folks won't tell you until it's gotten so bad that their system has become unusable. Most of the time I discover it when I start getting alerts from the antivrus or antimalware about suspicous activity or infected files.

Before I'd forced the intallation of antivirus on everyone's computers at the office (an action that was *very* unpopular and earned me an earful from the boss about "wasting company time and money"), cleaning viruses and malware had become far too common of an occurance -- about an incident very few weeks. Each incident required me to shut down the affected computer(s) -- rendering it unusable to the person(s) who normally used the affected computer(s) -- meaning that they couldn't perform many of their normal duties while I was cleaning out the system(s). And of course, this also usually meant that I wasn't performing my normal duties as well, as my computer was occupied during that time (since my computer was generally the only one that I was pretty sure wasn't infected, I had to use my workstation -- meaning it wasn't available for me to use while I was running the virus scan). We've gone through about four different solutions over the years -- rolling out those that became inffective for something that did a better job. So far the number of incidents have been kept down to to about three or four incidents per year. I've been also paying out of my own pocket for these solutions (mainly because I'd never get approval for their purchase -- as it was often considered to be "too expensive").