Following a conference call with a significant IT security vendor this week, I have decided to make AVID (Anti-Virus Is Dead) a semi-regular item in this blog. In AVID I will chart the gradual demise of signature-based anti-virus technology as it is superseded—as it inevitably will be—by technology that actually does the job. So AVID will continue to appear until some IT security expert convinces me that AV technology has a legitimate role in the computer world or hell freezes over.

The conference call, by the way, was subject to non-disclosure, so I can’t report on its content in any detail. As the company (a significant vendor in the IT security market) had contacted me because of my previous blog posting about AV, I had expected to be faced with a strongly dissenting opinion. Not so. Following a frank conversation, the company’s security expert and I ended up vigorously agreeing on most points of the argument. I also discovered that this vendor will (at some point) be launching a product that I may be able to add to the list of products from Bit9, Securewave and AppSense that do the AV job properly—and then some. If the company wants to call this product AVID, it has my blessing.

I am tempted to invoke the well-worn cliché and declare that the AV emperor has no clothes. However that would be unfair. The AV emperor is not entirely naked. Clothes he surely has, but unfortunately they do not entirely preserve his modesty. Indeed, from where I’m standing his privates are embarrassingly visible—and I’m not talking about the guys in uniform that are marching in front of him.

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