![]() Hypponen, chief researcher at F-Secure, called Flame “a spectacular failure” for the antivirus industry. In May, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered Flame, a complex piece of malware that had been stealing data from computers for an estimated five years. That process can take as little as a few hours or as long as several years. Just as medical researchers have to study a virus before they can create a vaccine, antivirus makers must capture a computer virus, take it apart and identify its “signature” - unique signs in its code - before they can write a program that removes it. Part of the problem is that antivirus products are inherently reactive. But the whole concept of detecting what is bad is a broken concept.” “This study is just another indicator of that. “Existing methodologies we’ve been protecting ourselves with have lost their efficacy,” said Ted Schlein, a security-focused investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. This despite the fact that consumers and businesses spent a combined $7.4 billion on antivirus software last year - nearly half of the $17.7 billion spent on security software in 2011, according to Gartner. And two of the products with the best detection rates - Avast and Emsisoft - are available free users are encouraged to pay for additional features. On average, it took almost a month for antivirus products to update their detection mechanisms and spot the new viruses. ![]() They found that the initial detection rate was less than 5 percent. Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technology officer, and a group of researchers collected and analyzed 82 new computer viruses and put them up against more than 40 antivirus products, made by top companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab. The bad guys have already had their fun, siphoning out a company’s trade secrets, erasing data or emptying a consumer’s bank account.Ī new study by Imperva, a data security firm in Redwood City, Calif., and students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is the latest confirmation of this. By the time its products are able to block new viruses, it is often too late. The antivirus industry has grown as well, but experts say it is falling behind. By 2010, there were 49 million new strains, according to AV-Test, a German research institute that tests antivirus products. ![]() In 2000, there were fewer than a million new strains of malware, most of them the work of amateurs.
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