As you may have know if you read this blog regularly, AVID (Anti Virus Is Doomed) is a semi-regular section where, when the mood takes me, I expose the fact that signature-based AV technology is utterly inadequate—because it fails to protect its users from a new virus for many hours after it first appears. The whole point of AVID is that there is excellent technology from three companies, Bit9, Securewave and AppSense that really does stop all viruses and by “all” I mean 100 percent, as opposed to AV technology which doesn’t. Companies that deploy these products don’t need AV technology and hence can save real dollars, pounds or euros by not paying for protection that doesn’t work.

How big is the shameful AV scam? According to Frost & Sullivan, the AV market had revenues of $3.27 billion in 2005 and it is likely to grow to $7.49 billion in 2012—unless I manage to stop it.

To that end, this week I’ve decided to publish The League Of Shame and name the ten AV companies that were found to be the worst at protecting you from viruses in a recent test of AV response. The figures I give below come from AV-Test.org (located in Germany at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg). They were arrived at by monitoring the responses of AV companies to new viruses over a 3 day period. The time period given below is the period of time before the named vendor was able to post an AV signature following the appearance of a new virus or virus variant.

The League of Shame

  1. InoculateIT-VET 29:45
  2. Symantec 27:10
  3. McAfee 26:11
  4. A2 24:12
  5. Esafe 17:16
  6. Panda 14:04
  7. Command 13:59
  8. Norton 13:10
  9. Trend Micro 13:06
  10. Dr Web 12:31

Symantec, shame on you. McAfee, shame on you too. We’re done here.

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