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Seems to me like they would also get a competitive edge by ignoring the expensive antivirus programming and just sending the occasional false alert to the user to make them think their software is actually doing something. When they get a real virus: "Well, we can't catch all of them, sorry. Go ahead and pay for an update, that might fix it."

How would you even know, unless you saw the source code?

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Aside from the difficulty in uncovering the truth, I think this would be a clear example of criminal fraud. It would take a pretty large effort to cover up something like this, as well (disgruntled ex-employees would be hugely incentivized to speak to prosecutors).

So while you probably wouldn't know via technical means, my gut feeling is that a conspiracy in a company that large would quickly surface.

I agree. My point was that you don't know what they're doing. It probably isn't as bad as "nothing at all", but you can't say where along the spectrum between that and "rock solid" they actually lie without taking a peek under the hood. Which is why I'm a proponent of free and open-source software wherever possible, especially for security applications.

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