Originally posted here by nihil
I don't quite agree,

The way I see it, a simple firewall set to "high" security with known trusted programs identified, will keep out a lot of subnet scanning scripts and the like. These are massively more numerous that firewall vulnerability exploits. A lot of them will warn you if there is an update, so that should not be a real isssue.

An AV, on the other hand, MUST be kept up to date, or it pretty soon becomes virtually useless. There are not that many "old" viruses left in the wild, and they tend to be relatively short lived compared to years ago when people used a lot of floppies. Once again, most of them will automatically update.

My main problem with out of date AV is it can start to give false positives if you are not keeping it up to date, but are updating and adding other software. As the actual item is not a virus, it cannot be cleaned, and the default setting is usually to delete the file...........not good

Cheers
I still have my AV scan for virii that are two years old, doesn't yours, if not, then I know what to attack you with. Old viruses still exist in the wild. My only analogy would be tuberculosis. Not that scary but if you aren't willing to diagnose it, it can be deadly.