How many viruses are made by anti-virus companies?

[Concerned User]

http://www.emsisoft.com/en/kb/articles/tec110601/

I'm not exactly a conspiracy theory guy...But when an AV vendor puts up an article like this one, what can I say? ......

[Jojoyee]

Wow, Ransomware does exist.

[wdhpr]

I suppose if you are using that logic what possible benefit would pharmacies have to create a drug that can cure cancer.

I think a certain amount of skepticism is healthy. To much not so much.

Ransomeware LOL

[MidnightCowboy]

This "theory" of course has been floated by different sources many times over the years but I think Christian Mairoll's explanation is about the best I've read.

Still sort of on topic and relevant to those who might have doubts about a particular vendor, is that of location. I don't want to infer any bias towards one country or another, but it is still a fact that the regulations governing how businesses operate are far stricter and more aggressively enforced in some parts of the world than others. Even within the EU, a quick bit of research amongst business orientated publications will reveal which amongst the member states are more likely to regulate their commercial enterprises as they should be under EU laws.

[eyeb]

The advantages obtained through detection of one extra piece of Malware against the sheer unbelievable volume released each month are simply too small.

His statement makes me think having a retroactive AV isn't very useful. Though I have thought this about defination based AV for a couple years and have been using other things to secure pc.

Firewall/Process hacker (setting to notify of new service/process start)/sandboxie/drive imaging/etc

Even though I keep Avira for AV, I no longer really care what it does. I also maybe update it once a day, maybe not... not a concern I have. For files I'm suspicious of, I use virustotal's uploader tool. Avira is just sitting in background more out of habit than actual use.

Do I trust Avira? sure, Do I actually let it do anything besides alert me? Of course not, it takes too long. I just upload it to virustotal, see if it's false positive or not. If real, I delete file and move on. If I need it ran I use sandboxie. If I need to repair it, I just recover it from imagine.