For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must.

For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must. A personal firewall such as Zone Alarm and running a program like HFNetcheck, which is a free download for personal users. It checks your system to see if anything needs to be patched. I'd also recommend a program such as SpyCop to periodically check for any spyware on your system.

Anti-virus software does nothing to stop a worm,

Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you.

So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock.

The sole goal is to get on a person's machine in very silent fashion, disable anti-virus software and then download its bigger brother.