I believe that was exactly the other commenter's point.

The funniest part is that the update was an exe to be run from the USB stick. The one thing you should not ever do on any system.

Unfortunately I wasn't prepared to broach the subject in a way that didn't have me say "you'd be safer without the AV". So I got nowhere.

Oh even worse! Yeah, you likely wouldn't have made any headway.

I’m of the opinion that 3rd party security software is malware. If it isn’t today, a future acquisition or enshittification ensures that it will be.

While true, the future is the future, and not entirely relevant.

Or do you eschew using a fork, because in 12 weeks in will fall on the floor?

Certainly, the problem is secret falls on the floor. The ones we can see can be handled.

This problem even happens with brand names, with hardware. You buy a fridge, and a decade later go to buy another. Meanwhile, megacorp has been bought by a conglomerate, and brand name is purposefully crap.

Imagine, if you will a bed of gold embroidered and wrought with the most excuisite works. Above the bed however is a sharp sword suspended on a single hair of a horse's tail. Would you avoid relaxing on the the bed because the sword may fall and kill you at some point in the future?

What’s wrong with the brand-name AV engines and security controls shipped with the OS? To me, it’s mostly just a lack of trust on the part of management.

Kaspersky is/was a brand-name AV. Look at what happened on their way out after the US ban...

All the major desktop OS have AV engines built by excellent teams. I do trust this more than McAfee or Norton. I also trust it not to take my machine down as much as CrowdStrike.

You trust native Windows security? I’m hoping it’s not, but what if a hospital’s decision looks like a choice between ransomware and a root system like crowd strike?

Have fun running your business with no third party software. You'll have to start by writing your own OS.

Speaking of which... it's remarkable that Microsoft Windows probably has code from 50,000 people in it. Yet there haven't been any (public) cases of people sneaking malicious code in. How come?

If Windows had malicious code in it, would we be able to tell the difference?

Sure, I’m sure somebody who is going to go through the effort of slipping malicious code into Windows would also make sure to do some QA on it. So it would be suspiciously unbuggy.