AVID, which stands for Anti-Virus Is Dying, is a semi-regular item in this Blog. AVID is my quixotic campaign to dismantle the $3.7 billion AV industry. The AV industry doesn’t deserve to disappear because its signature-based AV products offer inadequate protection to their users—if there were no alternatives to such technology, it might be excusable, but as it happens software products from at least 3 vendors; AppSense, Bit9 and Securewave (and possibly others) can and do make computers 100 percent virus-proof—and in the right way. Let’s stop the madness.
My last AVID posting published a League of Shame, exposing the amount of time that the AV vendors leave their customers vulnerable when a new virus appears. Was it a surprise to you that the two biggest AV vendors, Symantec (27 hours 10 minutes) and Network Associates, which markets the McAfee AV product, (26 hours 11 minutes) were among the three worst responders in this particular survey? It didn’t surprise me. “Par for the course” was my thought.
An AVID reader pinged me, saying she thought that maybe I should also publish the names of the companies that were at the bottom of that League of Shame. Should I or shouldn’t I?
I think I should, because it gives an indication of how long it takes to get an AV fix out, even if you do the job as quickly as it can be done. In the survey the fastest responses came from Kaspersky (6 hours 51 minutes) and Bitdefender (8 hours 21 minutes).
My correspondent also mentioned that her company was now looking for alternatives to AV, but wouldn’t be doing anything until their current license expired. Is this a straw in the wind? Well it might be, but it isn’t a whole haystack. One swallow doesn’t make a decent meal—as friend of mine from Liverpool used to say.
Nevertheless time is on my side. You will understand why I believe that, as the AVID blog postings roll out.
























