14 DAY TRIAL // If you want to surf the Internet and stay secure, you need to deploy the services of a firewall and the ones of an anti-virus. You need the firewall to keep others from entering your machine and you need the AV to neutralize any possible threats on your PC.
When I said that you might not need an AV of firewall, I certainly didn't mean that malicious users are going to get stomped and that they will stop their activities. No way! What I'm saying is the fact that the way things are going now, they might not be able to hack anything anymore.
How come? Well, they use vulnerabilities from your PC, some that programs have and some that operating systems have. Did you notice that after Service Pack II had been deployed, Windows became a lot safer? That's because it had less flaws that viruses could exploit. So if the programs had no bugs and nothing that hackers could attack, then you would be safe. And that's what the industry is going to. They are trying to make flawless programs that hackers cannot attack.
Since creating the programs they have been deploying software that will detect code vulns. And stuff like that. Sure, this is a lot of hard work and will take a lot of time, but it will be worth it. What we are doing now, with our AVs and firewalls is wearing kevlar in a war zone. But if the software on our PCs were flawless, it's like being made of kevlar!
And things are bound to get better, especially with the development of heuristics. With behavior analyzing software it will be a lot easier for program creators to look at their code and see what virus behavior it is vulnerable to. AV and firewall era is not yet reaching its end, but it will, someday, when we will have perfect programs.