Netflix Move Prompts Premature Antivirus Software Obit

[steven36]

"Is death knocking on the door of antivirus? Yes. Is it dead yet? No," said NSS Labs CEO Vikram Phatak. However, antivirus software is dead in a way, as it has evolved to become quite different from the original iterations. Those programs used software signatures to fight viruses. Much of today's antivirus software has more than signatures in its arsenal and doesn't do much virus fighting.

Netflix reportedly is in the process of dumping its antivirus software and placing all its faith in an alternative solution to protect its more than 60 million subscribers from online nastiness, a move that prompted one pundit to pronounce the death of antivirus software yet again.

By dropping its service, Netflix was hammering the last nail in antivirus software's coffin, suggested a Forbes article last month.

However, such dire pronouncements about antivirus software have been made for years, and they're likely to be made for many years to come.

"Antivirus persists, so I think calling it dead is not prudent," said Jason Brvenik, the principal engineer in Cisco's Security Business Group.

"Pronouncing AV dead is perhaps looking myopically at one portion of the role AV plays in the ecosystem for organizations," he told TechNewsWorld.

"The death of antivirus makes an impactful headline -- and yet the reality is that such headlines are hardly new, nor accurate," noted Raj Samani, vice president and CTO of Intel Security.


AV-Only Era Over
Antivirus software still has a role in protecting organizations against cyberattacks, Samani told TechNewsWorld. Antivirus works with other measures -- such as blacklisting, whitelisting, behavioral analysis, threat intelligence analysis and threat detection -- to create a more efficient approach to mitigating malware threats.
"The era of AV-only is over," said Piero DePaoli, Symantec Enterprise Security's senior director for global product marketing.

"AV is a baseline capability required for any endpoint protection product," he told TechNewsWorld, "but is just one piece of a broader arsenal of advanced protection technologies required to protect against the evolving threat landscape."

Where antivirus software falls down -- and why its critics have rushed over the years to dig its grave -- is in its ability to deal with sophisticated attacks.

"It won't handle a motivated attacker, but it will handle the mundane, and that's significant," Cisco's Brvenik said.

As imperfect as antivirus software is, it still performs a valuable service at the endpoints in any network.

"Here at Kaspersky Lab we record over 325,000 new malware samples every day," said North America Managing Director Chris Doggett.

"Without AV software as part of a security solution," he told TechNewsWorld, "we'd be giving up the idea of protecting endpoints and mobile devices, leaving millions of people at the mercy of cybercriminals."

Death Knock
While new technologies may run circles around antivirus software in identifying threats, AV programs do more than identify threats, which is why they continue to remain viable.

"As these [antivirus] products stand right now, they are the best solution we have today," said Vikram Phatak, CEO of NSS Labs.
"There are a bunch of new endpoint products, but none of them are equivalent to what an antivirus product does from a number of different angles -- everything from remediation to quarantine," he told TechNewsWorld.

"Is death knocking on the door of antivirus? Yes. Is it dead yet? No," Phatak said. "The new products that are claiming to subsume antivirus just aren't there yet."
However, antivirus software is dead in a way, as it has evolved to become quite different from the original iterations. Those programs used software signatures to fight viruses. Much of today's antivirus software has more than signatures in its arsenal and doesn't do much virus fighting.

Noise Reduction
Viruses -- self-propagating pieces of code that reproduce for their own benefit -- have become rare, Cisco's Brvenik noted. "We don't even see a ton of worms anymore. Everything now is malicious pieces of software to achieve some gain."

Software signatures are less important to antivirus programs. Signatures have been either supplemented or replaced with tools that identify threats by how they behave, rather than what they appear to be.

AV testing has shown that antivirus programs are missing about 4 percent of the threats in the wild, Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, pointed out.

"Four percent may not sound like much, but it's a lot when you consider there's a new threat being created every two seconds," he told TechNewsWorld.

Nevertheless, "I don't think antivirus, if modernized, is dead, because you still need to eliminate 90 percent of the noise out there, and focus your attention on how you construct your defense in depth against targeted attacks," Kellermann explained. "Everyone should use antivirus, as long as it's not solely signature-based."

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[rudrax]

Nightmare for its employees. After acquiring NOKIA they have fired thousands of their employees. Now after acquring AMD, god knows how many of them gonna get fired.

[212eta]

M$ can turn gold into :shit: