Anti-Botnet Market is Black Eye for AV Industry

alternative coup writes "eWEEK is running a story on the emergence of an anti-botnet market to fill a perceived need for software to deal with botnet-related malware (Trojans, keyloggers, rootkits, etc.). The article characterizes this as 'another black eye' for the existing anti-virus industry — asking consumers to pay twice for protection from things that anti-malware suites are missing. Venture capital money is flowing to these anti-bot products, an implicit statement that the AV giants are not doing their jobs. 'For companies such as Symantec, which sells the Sana-powered Norton AntiBot and anti-malware subscriptions, it's a nickel-and-dime situation. Symantec officials say Norton AntiBot is for a specialized, technical market segment looking for high-end tools to deal with botnets, but [Andrew Jaquith, an analyst with The Yankee Group] said it's a case of anti-malware companies double-dipping.'"

Comments

Re:I've already started dumping Norton

[Zeinfeld]

I recently cleaned up a relative's machine after reports that it was running slowly. He suspected a virus, the problem was that he had five different A/V packages on it, none of which he had asked for. Every tech support guy who had touched the machine had loaded his company package of goodies on it, including their A/V cramware. Then the A/V packages were fighting so it took 15 minutes to bring up explorer.

I killed all the A/V apart from the one that comes with AOL (which was the only one being updated in any case). Machine worked again. Problem solved.

Re:surely...

[TripMaster Monkey]

... the best protection against botnets is never install Windows?

That will only hold true as long as the market share for the non-Windows operating systems remains at its current levels. Whether Mac or Linux is intrinsically more secure than Windows is a subject for another (lengthy and heated) discussion, but the fact remains that practically, an OS is only as secure as the user running it lets it be. Linux users are much more secure from threats than Windows users for two reasons. One: since Linux accounts for such an infinitesimally small percentage of market share, malware coders don't waste their time coding for Linux. Two: since most Linux users are enthusiasts who generally know what they are doing, they can harden their installs to a greater degree than your average Joe-Sixpack Windows user.

A large upsurge in Linux use, especially by the 'typical' user that clicks on anything and everything, and runs their console session as root, would be irresistible to the malware coders, and you'd see the same situation you're seeing with Windows now.

Re:surely...

[Tridus]

Except what you'll see is 50 million computer users running Linux as root all the time because an OEM configured it that way rather then be annoyed with support calls asking how to install some new program. Those 50 million people then get an email about free XXX videos, run an attachment that installs various kinds of malware, and we're right back where we started.

Clueless users given the ability to become administrators (which they can if they own the machine) will defeat any OS security.

Re:Fundamentally broken

[wizardforce]

I would carry that idea even further and ask the question: how can an OS fix a fundamental problem of the security of the user. There's a saying: I'd rather have a security minded user on an insecure OS than a click-happy user on the most secure OS. just as an example, there are Windows users who haven't suffered from a virus in years. they surf online just as much as the fscked computer users do, they do not however click everything that comes in front of them so to speak. then there's the recent Mac garbageware that was on /. not very long ago. Now I'd argue that Mac has considerably better security compared to Windows but in this case it didn't really matter if the user was hell bent on installing whatever they like. FREE SCREENSAVERS INSTALL NOW!!!!

Re:A/V bloat due to antiquated approaches

[ppanon]

IANAB (I am not a biologist), but it seems that our body's immune system operates more on heuristics than some exhaustive chemical look up table.

Yep, you're no biologist, and even less of an immunologist. You need to read up on antibodies. Now, part of the immune system does work on heuristics, but a big part of it is all the antibodies running around your body as a "chemical lookup table", but one with a massively parallel seek mechanism.