I was asked last week why I keep changing the D-word in AVID e.g. Antivirus Is Dead, Doomed, Dying and Dysfunctional. To be honest, it’s a cheap and obscure trick; here’s a tortuous explanation.

I am running a campaign to bring down the $3.7 billion AV industry. The idea is simply to tell the truth, week after week about the fact that AV technology provides inadequate protection and it also happens to be unnecessary, because there is perfectly adequate technology from at least 3 companies; AppSense, Bit9 and Securewave that does the job properly and actually does stop all viruses.

This blog gets somewhere between 4000 and 25000 readers each week. The number varies dramatically because a good number of visitors are drawn by headline and topic. Apple, Firefox and Linux, for example, boost the numbers. Of course if I just repeat the message: Anti-Virus is Dead, everyone will get bored and I’ll lose at least some of the readership. And that’s not what I want. What I want is readers returning regularly every fortnight to read the AVID posting even if they read nothing else.

So every AVID posting has to be colourful and different and cover another aspect of that utterly inadequate technology that fails to protect your PCs very well. I’m expecting that some readers will drop in just to see which D-word I’ve chosen this week. This week’s D-word, by the way, is Demise and thus AVID stands for AntiVirus In Demise.

This is very appropriate because of what I have to report: I am reliably informed that a trend to abandon AV is in progress. A growing number of organizations are evicting AV technology from their networks and no longer paying the AV protection money. I have also been told that this blog has had influence in those sites.

So here’s the point. Previously, sensible businesses were buying and deploying product from AppSense, Bit9 and Securewave, because it does more than just protect against malware. It can be justified in other ways. For example, it also ensures good governance of the installation of software on PCs. However these businesses were loathe to evict the unnecessary AV technology in case some security auditor or other started to raise objections. The AV mindshare was too high and they felt exposed. Now it’s not so high.

So there’s a nascent trend here. The numbers are still small, but they include some government sites! Hearing that was big news for me, because government sites nowadays are very particular about security.

So is AntiVirus In Demise? “Not yet” is my answer. If you’re thinking it takes more than 5 blog postings to bring down a $3.7 billion lack-of-protection racket, then I agree with you. I expect it to take at least 20.