>>>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.
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>>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.
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>How you interpret a statement is up to you. I said "AV is virtually a worthless business. It cannot keep up with the changing malware landscape." The sentence is factually correct as it relates to viruses and the anti-virus business. It does not dismiss the usefulness of firewalls (host and perimeter / software and hardware versions) and particularly stateful inspection firewall, applying whitelisting/default deny policy vs. using a blacklisting policy which is useless, regularly scheduled deep-scanning using anti-malware programs particularly on the server, proper email filtering/checking at the mail server, operating system patching and patching in general, browser lockdown like NoScript in Firefox, and other preventative and detective measures. Real-time anti-virus scanning for infected files is virtually worthless since it is simply not going to be up to date on the current threat landscape.

Perhaps I should clarify -- it wsn't that I was interpreting your statement in that manner -- merely stating that there are a few folks (that I consider insane) who might interpret it in the manner I've suggested. What I find most worrying is that some of those folks happen to be IT managers -- the ones that install a server, then literally forget about it -- never performing any sort of maintenance or backup whatsoever (it's a bad sign when they don't know where their servers are located).