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Your antivirus software is watching you. A recent study shows that popular antivirus applications like Avast assign your computer a unique identifier and send a list of all web addresses you visit to the manufacturer. If the antivirus finds a suspicious document, it will send the document to the antivirus company. Yes, your antivirus company might have a list of web pages you've visited along with your sensitive personal documents!
http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/avc_datasending_2014_en.pdf (PDF Download) pretty charts comparing a variety of specific data reporting between vendors and products, https://www.bof.nl/live/wp-content/uploads/Letter-to-antivirus-companies-.pdf (PDF download) I believe this is the original open letter which led to the charts PDF
"According to a top-secret GCHQ warrant renewal request written in 2008 and published today by The Intercept, the British spy agency viewed Kaspersky software as an obstruction to its hacking operations and needed to reverse engineer it to find ways to neutralize the problem. Doing so required obtaining a warrant."
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2106783/project-camberdada.pdf (PDF Download) purports to be a top secret document outlining the interception to malware reporting to AV providers
So - how valuable is an AV program? Is your AV transmitting data to the NSA? Does your AV provide a "backdoor" into your computer?
Much has been said about the advisability of running an AV on *nix. Much has been said about the inherent security of *nix. Right now, I'm somewhat happy/relieved that I am NOT running any proprietary antivirus programs.
Disclaimer: I am reading a fascinating work of fiction, which postulates that your antivirus shares data with the NSA. Given that postulation, I went looking for information. I'll be more than happy to disclose the title and author in the comments section - just ask!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday October 28 2015, @04:28PM
"Let's allow a program with administrative privileges, which regularly scans and indexes every file on your hard disk / network for patterns, which can upload examples to the cloud, acts on signatures and heuristics updates sent to it by its manufacturer every single day, and which the user EXPECTS to listen in on all their Internet traffic, every file they open, whenever they open it, etc. and which has carte blanche to decide what other programs can and cannot run (and which does not co-operate nicely with any competing software trying to see what IT is doing)"
Because THAT'S the way that we'll stay secure and nobody will get their hands on our data.
It bugs me that for decades people have not considered this.