It can now be safely stated that the entirety
of the antivirus and computer
security industry has undergone a complete sea-change in recent years.
Gone are the “good ol’ days” when viral attacks made big headlines and all
the antivirus industry had to do was sit back while everyone rushed out to
get the latest security software.
Nope. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, we are much more likely to hear
about some large Fortune 500 company, a financial institution, or even the
government being hacked into by cyber-criminals for the purposes of
stealing money, confidential information, or both.
And if we do hear about it, the odds are that we are hearing about such
break-ins long after the fact, and only after a public disclosure was
unavoidable.
The current state-of-affairs has lead to a very weird set of circumstances
that has left companies who thought they were protected baffled, and
unsuspecting public more vulnerable than they have ever been, and the
antivirus industry scrambling for solutions.
“The truth of the matter is that we are living in a day and age where
cyber-criminals and hackers rule the Internet, and the general public is
more vulnerable to attack than they have ever been,” says Ryan
Sherstobitoff, senior security analyst for Panda Security. “The lack of
big headlines has lulled the general public into a false sense of security.
As the public begins to find out what is really going on, many will
experience a sense of disappointment — to put it mildly.”
In a nutshell, this is the situation. A few years ago, criminal elements
– including organized crime — began to realize that the Internet was
going to be a prime source of ill-gotten profit. A quiet evolution began
to take place where malware attacks began to go silent. Stealth became the
name of the game with financial gain as the main motivation.
“A whole new class of malware began to appear,” says Sherstobitoff. “This
new breed of malware could sneak past traditional antivirus programs and
firewalls, and reside totally undetected on computer systems. While there,
they would steal as much information as they could, and then disappear
without a trace.”
In other words, hackers and cyber-criminals realized that some of the best
targets of their attacks were computer networks that thought that they were
“protected.” Because the antivirus programs in use said the
system was not infected, hidden malware could sit within a system for
months. If the breach was discovered, it was usually by accident and
almost always far too late to undo the damage.
And no one is anxious to talk about this. If you are the company whose
computer security has been compromised, it’s not something that you are
going to want to broadcast. If you are the antivirus or security company
supplying the protection, you are not going to want to let it be known that
your software isn’t working.
The unfortunate consumer, not hearing much publically, assumes everything
is fine without much to worry about.
There is another tactic, however, that the bad guys are using to defeat the
antivirus companies: overwhelming the system with so much malware that the industry can’t
keep up.
“This has proven to be a very smart maneuver by the bad guys,” notes
Sherstobitoff. “Somebody got the bright idea that if enough malware was
created and released on the Internet, the antivirus industry might not be
able to keep up. Well, I hate to say it, but they were right.”
Research, in fact, shows that more malware has been released into the wild
in the past 12 months, than in the previous 15 years combined. PandaLabs,
a division of Panda Security, reports that it detects some 3000 new malware
samples a day via its worldwide detection system.
The result has been that most antivirus companies simply don’t have the
manpower or resources to keep up with the deluge. This means that a
certain percentage of malware is never detected or diagnosed — which means
the public at large is left completely vulnerable.
Panda Security, however, may have come up with a solution to this problem.
Using a worldwide detection system called “Collective Intelligence,” Panda
decided to automate the entire process. As a result, Panda Security is one
of the few antivirus companies that is able to reasonably keep pace with
the flood of malware on the Internet.
“Collective Intelligence was a real breakthrough for us,” explains
Sherstobitoff. “Now, instead of having a problem keeping up, we are able
to detect, analyze, and release an antidote far, far faster than any human
could do it. This technology has allowed us to maintain a very high level
of protection for our customers without the vulnerabilities that many other
companies have to contend with.”
Indeed, the situation has gotten so bad that many of the major IT
publications have run feature articles questioning the future of the
industry as a whole if it does not come up with solutions to the current
boom in malware. Gartner, in fact, predicted this situation over a year
ago by noting that traditional antivirus solutions were no longer effective
against today’s malware.
Information provided by: Findarticles.com
