This week AVID stands for AntiVirus in Denial. Denial, to repeat the old pun, is not just a river in Egypt, it is also the reaction of the AntiVirus industry to this blog.

If you’ve stumbled on this blog by accident, AVID is my campaign to repeatedly expose the fact that signature-based AV technology is horribly inadequate, because it fails to protect its users from new viruses for many hours and often several days after they appear. And yet complete AV protection and more comprehensive all round security capability is available (from three companies, Bit9, Securewave and AppSense). Organizations that deploy these products don’t need AV technology.

Let’s abandon AV.

Perhaps one might expect someone in the $3 billion plus AV industry to respond to this regular drum beat, by posting some kind of counter argument. But much to my lack-of-surprise, we have experienced (as Sherlock Holmes remarked in The Hounds of The Baskervilles), the strange phenomenon of the dog that didn’t bark. Much silence makes a mighty noise, as they say in Africa. Could it be that the AV vendors are too busy counting their undeserved revenues to care or are PR consultants strongly advising their AV customers not to engage with this turbulent analyst at all?

P.S. No need to wonder, it’s the second of these two. We found this out later when the AV vendors finally did begin to engage. Ed

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