The contemporary antivirus industry and its problems

[office politics]

The contemporary antivirus industry and its problems

Eugene Kaspersky, who heads the Russian anti-virus maker Kaspersky Lab, has published an excellent article that offers a refreshingly honest look at the shortcomings inherent in most anti-virus products on the market today.

Briefly, the paper points out that most AV vendors are having trouble keeping pace in the "virus arms race." Virus authors take advantage of the fact that anti-virus software depends on frequent virus-definition updates to spot the latest malware. By the time those products are updated to detect the latest threat, the virus writers have already released several newer versions that evade the latest anti-virus signatures.

All of which necessarily leads to the dirtiest open secret in the anti-virus community today: A lot of the time, anti-virus software simply doesn't work. Kaspersky writes, "malicious programs propagate so quickly that anti-virus companies have to release updates as quickly as possible to minimize the amount of time that users will potentially be at risk. Unfortunately, many anti-virus companies are unable to do this - users often receive updates once they are already infected."