Anti-virus software enters the fray

As software security suites now face a wider range of threats and as companies try to address every possible route of attack, the end result has become something like Norton Internet Security. Norton Internet Security offers excellent protection against all known viruses “in the wild” (West Coast Labs’s dataset) as well as most rootkits, but it has become unwieldy and a system resource hog in the process, often causing system instability as it tries to be as close to the metal was possible. In fact, Norton Internet Security has become so unwieldy that most end-users are told to uninstall Norton Internet Security due to system instability and loss of system performance. The most secure PC is the one that’s turned off.

There is also no such thing as perfect security – while Symantec and ESET NOD32 are the only two anti-virus scanners capable of detecting all known polymorphic variants in the wild as of February 2007 (av-comparatives.org; in comparison to AVG’s 16.7% rate, Microsoft Live One Care’s 25% rate, or Kapersky’s 66.7%), both Symantec and NOD32 failed to detect as many script viruses, backdoors, or trojans as their competitors. The malware scene has won the battle against Windows XP.

The war between the malicious hackers and security specialists has expanded onto new fronts. More and more people have moved to web-based email systems in an attempt to minimize virus exposure, but AJAX and web application exploits have already been described. Even spam, a “computationally benign” threat draws the attention of today’s security specialists away from worms and other security threats.

Finally, the increased accessibility of computer technology and the Internet means that the average Internet user of today is not as technically savvy as the average Internet user of the early 90’s. Computers were developed in a time where performance was paramount and users were technical experts. Things have changed. Today, you have to protect users from themselves.