Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Anti-Virus Is Dead (But Still Makes Money) Says Symantec

Posted by timothy on from the look-for-antivirus-with-the-rms-serial-of-approval dept.

judgecorp (778838) writes "Symantec says anti-virus is dead but the company — the world's largest IT security firm — still makes 40 percent of its revenue there. AV now lets through around 55 percent of attacks, the company's senior vice president of information security told the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, other security firms including FireEye, RedSocks and Imperva are casting doubt on AV, suggesting a focus on data loss prevention might be better."

3 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No explanation for why though? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because marketing is more effective than a quality product.

  2. Re:No explanation for why though? by manu144x · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One answer could be because now threats are mostly targeted at the biggest weakness: humans. Phishing, scams, and all that are much more profitable and incredibly hard to detect programmatically. Legit websites are hacked daily and injected phishing sites and then removed fast.

    They all rely pretty much on human stupidity and ignorance, and that is very hard to stop...

  3. AV dead? Symantec's certainly is by argStyopa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wouldn't use a Symantec product if it was an extinguisher and I was on fire.

    Nobody even vaguely familiar with PC support over the last 20 years can possibly fail to be acquainted with what was (is?) the most complicated, agonizing, and laborious process that was removing a Symantec/Norton antivirus "product" from a computer.
    Seriously, with a newer machine, just re-installing the OS was far quicker, easier, and less likely to leave you with later issues.

    As an AV product, it was not terribly successful in most neutral tests I saw.

    If you didn't uninstall it, it was a resource hog, bringing even powerful machines to their proverbial knees when scanning. If you were foolish enough to install the 'suite' of security applications, it would involve literally dozens of services installed obscurely across your system. Removing it was very much like (or worse than) trying to get rid of some of the most tenacious malware I've ever encountered.

    Truly, the 'cure' in this case was nearly worse than the disease. They *owned* the PC security market in the early days...why do you think its competitors have been so widely successful?

    --
    -Styopa