this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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The best security is to limit your risk vector.
Like you said Anti-viruses aren't some magic bullet, in university a bunch of us wrote Malware and wrecked each other's lab computers or did things like having the whole Lab's computers CD trays open at 10am every morning.
The AV didn't pick up any of them and we barely knew what we were doing.
Afik, AV's mostly scan for known threats
Old AV did. Modern AV (like, the last 10+ years) is behavioral. They still scan for signatures too, but they primarily work by analyzing software's behavior for known or unusual techniques.
I'd be curious to rewrite some of the malware we made in class and see if AVs would pick it up now.
Most of them didn't make any network calls etc. they would just mess with your files and system Things like Set background to Justin-Bieber, play Justin-Bieber randomly, we were very mature
12 years ago I took "Malicious Software and its Underground Economy: Two Sides to Every Story" and it was quite interesting not so much for the technical aspect (which was still nice) but for the economical aspect that is often underappreciated. The core idea was that scammers or hackers might be doing it for fun, as you did, or learning, as I did... but the ones who keep on doing it sustainably make money out of it, consequently they are predictable. Namely they need repeatable methods that scale or that target a specific group. I really recommend taking a similar class but anyway, the big picture here is sure, maybe AV would miss such things and yet it wouldn't really matter because nearly nobody does that and/or it wouldn't propagate much.