F secure antivirus 2008 software#

F secure antivirus 2008 software#

Such tools whitelist the software we use and won't run anything else without the user's explicit permission.Īntivirus firms think their death is greatly exaggerated, thank you very mucheven those that aren't overly reliant on signatures, like BitDefender, which says that signature-based techniques account for only 20 percent of the malware it catches. In fact, in 2006, Robin Bloor, an analyst at Hurwitz & Associates, penned a report titled 'Anti-virus is dead.' He argued that malware exists only because antivirus software exists, and said that antivirus software was doomed to be replaced by new forms of software, which he calls application control, or software authentication tools. The number of malware signatures tracked by security software company F-Secure doubled in 2007, and while you might cynically expect such a company to say there's more malware out there, 2007's total doubled the number of signatures F-Secure had built up over the previous 20 years.Įven before 2007, there were plenty of people besides Shipley arguing that antivirus was an industry in trouble.

In its current, more sophisticated form, it dominates the market for security software, despite some obvious limitations: You don't use it to stop data leakage, for instance, though many kinds of malware are designed to siphon data out of companies. Signature-based antivirus has moved well beyond that simple type of signature usage (though at the beginning, it did look for specific lines of code). The question is, where should he go? Antivirus as an industry has modeled itself on the human immune system, which slaps a label on things like viruses so it knows to attack them when it sees that same label, or signature, again.

I think it's a broken model and I think it's an incredible CPU hog.' 'I want to get off of signature-based antivirus as rapidly as possible. Shipley, CTO at Neohapsis, a security consultancy in Chicago, says the worst part is that the arms race isn't helpful either to him or his clients. It's a silly little arms race that has no end.' 'The relationship between signature-based antivirus companies and the virus writers is almost comical-one releases something and then the other reacts, and they go back and forth. Antivirus software makes Greg Shipley so mad he has to laugh.