Symantec Exec Declares Antivirus is Dead

 

Antivirus detects only 45% of all attacks which renders the widely used protection ineffective according to industry experts. Brian Dye, senior vice-president for information security at Symantec, has declared antivirus as “dead”. This comes from a company that has been a leading innovator of antivirus products since the 1980s.

Cyber criminals and hackers have simply outsmarted the developers at antivirus companies. At first the industry approach was detect and then protect. That method worked when the amount of malware and viruses being produced was relatively low. Once the amount of malware created per year reached the level of millions of variants the “detect and protect” approach became impractical. At that time a quasi-artificial intelligence called “heuristic detection” was developed. Heuristics worked for the 1990s and early 2000s. But, the bad guys found a way to bypass the heuristic detection. Hackers now use a method called “cypting” that renders malware undetectable to antivirus software and malware tools.

Brian Krebs, a computer security reporter describes this “crypting” method, “Put simply, a crypting service takes the bad guy’s piece of malware and scans it against all of the available antivirus tools on the market today – to see how many of them detect the code as malicious. The service then runs some custom encryption routines to obfuscate the malware so that it hardly resembles the piece of code that was detected as bad by most of the tools out there. And, it repeats this scanning and crypting process in an iterative fashion until the malware is found to be completely undetectable by all of the antivirus tools on the market.”

The cyber criminals and hackers call this kind of malware “full un-detectable” or “FUD” for short. This is the reason antivirus is now only 45% effective. So, if you have been depending on antivirus as your sole means of protecting your computers you are in for a rude awakening. And, if you have felt safe because your computer hasn’t crashed, you are even in for a bigger rude awakening. Professional cyber criminals and hackers will NOT crash your computer. That would defeat their purpose of pilfering your data and using your computer to cover their tracks when attacking other computers.  There is absolutely NO benefit to the cyber criminal to crash your computer.   They may encrypt your data and blackmail your into paying a ransom to get your data back, but they won't crash your computer. 

In future blogs I will discuss alternatives to antivirus protection that is more effective.  Stay tuned.