Not Even 5% Anti Viruses Block New Viruses, Discovers Imperva

Imperva the provider of business security software recently published its 'Hacker Intelligence Report of 2012' that features a research titled "Assessing the Effectiveness of Antivirus Solutions," according to which, not even 5% of AV programs tried could identify previously unlisted malware.

The vendor described over 40 anti-viruses (AV), after involving them in its research, as highly insufficient to safeguard IT data against 82 freshly designed computer viruses, which were thrust on them during the trials.

The result, according to the data center vendor, is that organizations and individual Internet-users expending huge sums on such programs merely obtain an 'artificial sense of safety' by deploying them.

Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva says that businesses' IT security only receives an imaginary return from these anti-viruses for actually, whenever any new virus is created it successfully weakens them. Thus, it can hardly be said about organizations as getting worthy returns from their massive dollar investments into the AV products, particularly when a few products, free-of-cost, which were experimented in the research, outperformed the priced products, contends Shulman. Darkreading.com published this dated December 5, 2012.

Imperva observes in its research that no anti-virus solution could effectively detect and keep separate any virus that emerged newly. Nonetheless, the company points out that the actual problem relates to the period of difference between knowing the details of such malware and the mean time of 3-weeks the tried out anti-viruses took for addressing them.

Interestingly, even with the anti-viruses being insufficiently effective, Imperva suggests organizations to keep on purchasing licensed AV programs, as per the mandatory norm. Yet, as per the company, there should be liberalization of this condition so organizations can purchase free AVs instead, while make most of the idle funds for investing in other security systems.

Precisely, the report recommends that the idea isn't to discard anti-viruses. Rather there should be a modernizing and rebalancing of the funds spent on security in a way it addresses current threats.

Besides, NSS Labs, during August 2012, found that several AV programs couldn't stop malware from abusing dual Microsoft flaws already patched long time up, implying malware creators still surpass security professionals.

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» SPAMfighter News - 12/18/2012