Sunset on Antivirus

When I was first briefed, about a couple of years ago, by Securewave, a European security start-up that was establishing itself in the US, I concluded that their approach to IT security would eventually supersede antivirus software. Securewave could have aggressively marketed the fact that it made antivirus software defunct, but it didn’t. You can’t take on industry giants when you have a very limited marketing budget, can you?

The next company I came across with a similar proposition was Bit9. They didn’t have an identical approach to Securewave, but it was very similar…

Put simply, the approach of both companies is like this: You fingerprint valid executables. You stop anything that is not authorized from running. You allow self-authorization, but you quarantine anything that is authorized by the PC user until it has been authorized officially. You can do this on servers too. The details of how and the various nuances vary.

The point is that it stops viruses stone dead—including ALL zero-day exploits. Actually it also stops a good deal of bad user behaviour too, like loading your own applications. That’s its major function. The killing of viruses is a simple side effect. It won’t stop buffer overflow attacks by hackers, but it will stop the successful overflow-attacker-hacker from doing much to subvert the attacked machine.

So last week I ran into a third vendor with this kind of security technology: AppSense. AppSense has come to market quite recently with its security offering, but it has a highly functional capability because it has been making a tidy living from selling management software in the Citrix environment and now it has specialized some of this for security market. Three times is the charm, I guess. Here’s the point: AppSense has one customer that has installed AppSense and thrown away all the antivirus software it previously ran. (No problems experienced, by the way).

Like Securewave, AppSense is not going to pick a marketing fight with the big antivirus vendors, but nevertheless the tide has now turned and soon it will be racing in.

Antivirus software is no longer required.

It’s over for antivirus software.

Come in antivirus software, your time is up.

There you are; I’ve said it thrice and what I say three times is true.

The current success that Apple is having will not have gone unnoticed in Redmond. Microsoft is, at the moment, fighting a rearguard action on several fronts. As part of its gradual march to releasing Longhorn, Microsoft has released the first beta of IE 7. According to reports, it looks (predictably) like Firefox. Clearly IE 7 will not change the world, but it may reduce the number of Firefox migrants. At the same time, the Mozilla Foundation has started a for-profit subsidiary to promote Firefox. It is a moot point as to whether Microsoft will be able to regain market share from Firefox when Longhorn kicks in.

So the news also broke last week that Longhorn will be known as Vista when it finally comes to market in the second half of 2006. And the marketing campaign is off and running. Vista is now available in beta so there are already comparisons on the web between it and Apple’s Tiger. They suggest that Microsoft has yet again borrowed from the Mac look and feel.

However Vistas’ search capability is ahead of Tiger as are a number of other features. Microsoft’s problem here is that the official release of Vista will probably turn into an Apple v Microsoft beauty contest, with Apple releasing its next version of OS X (Leopard) when Vista is officially released. Apple has a year in which to introduce features that will put Vista in the shade – if it cares to.

It’s unlikely that Microsoft will be able to do anything with Vista to win back the customers it is now losing to Apple and it now runs the risk of being upstaged on the official release.

Apple, by the way, has reinvented the mouse. Its new mouse may turn out to be no more than a curiosity. It has a 360-degree scroll wheel and four programmable buttons, allowing the user to scroll up, down, or diagonally. It is priced at $99 and may be popular among users of Abode Photoshop because it will improve the navigability of a photograph.

This mouse will not change the world. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the mouse is the amount of publicity it has gathered for Apple. Which other company could launch a new mouse and get such broad coverage? It’s just a damn mouse.