ripley your own link implies that security companies are padding their virus signature to make it seem worst than what it is.
for example between april 4 and april 12 there were 106,976 new definitions were added, but out of those 12 were new and 291 revised. so "So where does the 100,000+ number come from? It appears to be a count of individual pieces of identifying data—signatures—associated with those named entries. Counting every signature is an easy way to get to an impressively large number, but it isn’t an accurate way to acesss the current threat landscape" [had two revised as the auto revision kicked in on the quote lol].
and that was a quote from your own link. which brings up two points only one of which is true.
1 you didnt read the link or
2 you didnt understand it.
semp
No, it's obvious that you're on a personal vendetta of some sort and either your rage made you fail to understand what I wrote or you chose to do so. I made no claim that there were 17+ million different viruses, I said there were that amount of VARIANTS. Anyone who knows even the basics about viruses, also knows that most commonly old viruses are recycled by altering their signature a wee bit and anyone can pay a couple hundred dollars and get a toolbox for tailoring your own attacks. This is enough to fool non-heuristic detection systems and therefore poses a clear threat even if the virus is 'old'.
The effect of running heuristics, again, is sometimes just as bad as having viruses. Computer starts to lag bad.
The threat to windows users is very clear and present.
As it happens just today I was consulting a client again that had an infection on his computer - despite having 'the best AV in the world' as advertised running. Didn't do squat, browsers were hijacked and who knows what else
Chrome browser had lost all its toolbars, Firefox took an eternity to open and started removing add-ons automatically, AV screamed about 'unknown process trying to alter browser settings' and yet, there the bug was alive and well...
