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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."

8 of 254 comments (clear)

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

    "AV now lets through around 55 percent of attacks" What happened? What's the big game changer from the 95% detections of just a few years ago?

    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. Re:No explanation for why though? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Interesting

      yes, but when you can cut costs and not have any issues, a lot of places will do it.

      I'd like to see reliable evidence of this. I've heard this crap ever since Anthony Bourdain included it in some rant in one of his books about people who liked meat cooked more than medium-rare. Perhaps he was known to serve crappy food to those people, but I'd be really interested to know how widespread the practice is.

      Because if you search around on some cooking forums, you'll see other actual chefs chime in and say they do NOT do this. Actual chefs will tell you that they tend to have thinner cuts available for people who like well-done, so as not to delay the entire order while cooking one steak longer. (If they don't have this, they'll generally offer to butterfly the cut.) But actually serving people crappier meat? Not so much that I've heard, outside of Tony's confessions of being a jerk.

      theres no point in spending 20$ on a prime steak if the person eating it cant tell the difference between a shoe and a steak.

      "Prime" ratings refer to marbling, not necessarily quality of taste. So, if you pay more for "prime," you're paying for more fat. That fat won't disappear completely if the steak is cooked well done: in fact, more of it will often soften, because temperatures about 130 F (temp for medium-rare) allow faster break-down of a lot of fat. Case in point: taste a low-quality fatty cut cooked fast on a hot grill (often lots of gristle) vs. similar meat from the same part of the cow cooked to a much higher temperature longer as a pot roast... all that fat will be melt-in-your-mouth tender. A well-done steak, done properly, can be somewhere in between.

      For the record, I generally order my steaks medium rare, and I agree that that maximizes certain aspects (particularly juiciness and tenderness).

      But for those who like well-done, they often get extra browning flavors from the Maillard reaction and caramelization, and the extra fat break-down can do good things for the fat (though making the muscle tougher). If the steak is heated slowly before grilling or finished in the oven at a very low temperature, it can also be quite juicy (contrary to popular belief). Cooking a steak well-done that tastes good is also an art, and probably even more finicky that cooking one medium-rare.

      Anyhow, sorry, but if you are actually able to tell a prime-grade steak at medium-rare, you should also be able to tell one at well-done. If you can't, you probably don't know as much about steaks as you think you do. Different people like different things, but that doesn't excuse insulting them or serving them crappier food.

  2. Most AV is malware by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Of all the problems that my relatives have called upon me to fix on their machines AV might be the number one complaint. They buy a machine from some big box store (against my recommendation) and the AV becomes more and more threatening as to the dire situation their machine is in and how only a subscription to their product will solve the problem.

    Then to make it worse the AV infests the machine like a spreading cancer. The browsers work funny, the startup is longer, the thing periodically pigs out on the internet. But it might be the popups that are the worst. We have all see the public jumbotron/Kiosk with a big AV popup front and center.

    Personally I blame AV bloatware for being one of the downfalls of the PC industry. People were buying their shiny new machines hoping that all their problems would go away and poof their new machine is effectively just as crappy as their old machine with these incomprehensible popups and threats.

    My only happiness in this situation is that the AV products haven't managed to get much traction in the mobile device industry.

    The key thing to keep in mind is that when you buy a basic PC from a manufacturer that they don't make much if any profit from the machine. It is the kickbacks they get from the crap AV, crap game, and crap music services that come as trialware. So if the AV industry has a business model based upon fooling people, kickbacks, and annoying people; then they can't die too soon.

    The horrible thing is that some products like NOD32 were awesome and didn't play those MBA games.

  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
  4. Maybe that their AV sucks? by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Good anti-virus still has high detection rates. AV Comparitives puts most virus scanners above 90% detection in their March real world protection test. The better ones are in the 98%+ range. http://www.av-comparatives.org...

    Of course Symantec isn't on that list... perhaps there's a reason :).

  5. Re:Does the nature of the business hold it back by westlake · · Score: 5, Funny

    Your typewriter needs a new ribbon.