<https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/10/opinion_column_consumer_av/>: Game knows game. Thus it came as little surprise that Norton's consumer security software not only sprouted a cryptominer that slurps your computer's life essence and skims a cut, but that it's hard to turn it off. ... Now? Even the meanest computer has hardware and software architectures that can be, and often are, configured for very high resilience against classic virus attacks. The observant may have noted that data security has not been solved – but the attacks aren't the sort of thing that resident consumer AV software can do much about. Endpoint protection managed in the cloud, whether explicit anti-malware services or OS-led protection as seamless as Chrome OS or through aggressive online patching, is as good as it's going to get. Keep up to date, and third-party security software you have to manage has no right to your system at all. Obvious question: how long before proprietary “OS-managed” or “cloud-managed” antimalware starts resorting to the same sharp practices as the consumer-grade stuff? Just consider how often Microsoft has tricked or strong-armed users into installing things they may not want, and made it hard to remove them ...