Antivirus

A constant sore point in security is anti-virus programs. Interestingly, in a clean default installation of Windows Vista, Security Center will show a yellow severity warning because there is no antivirus program installed by default.

Opinions on anti-virus programs are mixed. According to the anti-virus vendors they are the panacea that will save the world from certain destruction. According to at least one of the authors, they are leading us to believe that we are far safer than we really are and cause us to fail to focus on the actual problem: protecting users from attacks that are increasingly not signature based and increasingly targeting them: the users (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/07/SecurityWatch/default.aspx). According to at least one Microsoft exec, Windows Vista is so secure you do not need antivirus, while another asked the bad guys to "bring it on." Most rational people, including both authors, still acknowledge that anti-virus programs generally should be installed on most computers, although for many it was also a very long time since they last had one actually find a real virus.

64-bit versions of Windows Vista were a bit of a concern in this department for a while. However, by the time you read this, most of the popular anti-virus programs should be offering versions for both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows Vista.